FractCIO

Carve-Outs & Separations

The parent stops providing IT. Something has to replace it.

When a sponsor carves a business out of its parent, the acquired company loses the infrastructure, applications and support it silently depended on. A separation programme has to design the standalone environment, move the estate onto it, and prove the business can trade on Day 1 — usually against a contractual close date that does not move.

Delivered from the managed hosting provider side as Technical Principal at Syntax Systems / Freudenberg IT, 2016–2021. Scope owned: application and dependency analysis, data migration strategy, cutover sequencing, and cross-team technical consulting across client, parent and third-party teams. Scheduling was owned by a separate project manager.

01·Private-equity-owned client·Technical Principal / Technical Lead

Global Data Center Separation

Challenge

A divested business had to exit its parent's data centers across three regions onto a standalone hosted platform, with Day 1 readiness contractually fixed to the close date.

Scope Owned

Owned application and dependency analysis across the client's ERP and business application estate, the data migration strategy, and the cutover sequencing. Coordinated the technical workstream across client, parent and third-party teams through to Go-Live.

Outcomes

  • 800+ virtual machines migrated across North America, Europe and India
  • Go-Live executed in a 28-hour window with zero technology incidents
  • 100% of data migrated
  • Day 1 readiness delivered against a contractual close date
  • 99.79% uptime sustained across the five-year term that followed
02·Sponsor-backed client·Technical Principal / Technical Lead

Separation onto Hosted AWS

Challenge

A second separation required the client's full application estate to come off the parent's data center onto a dedicated AWS environment under managed hosting.

Scope Owned

Target-state design on AWS, dependency mapping of the enterprise application landscape, and migration strategy for the production database estate — sequenced so the business could operate independently at close.

Outcomes

  • Full application estate moved onto a dedicated AWS environment
  • Standalone operating model established under managed hosting
  • Post-close separation execution completed for a sponsor-backed portfolio company

The language of a separation

Separation programmes are specified in a vocabulary of their own. These are the terms the work is scoped, contracted and measured in.

  • Divestiture
  • Carve-out
  • Spin-off
  • Business separation
  • Day 1 readiness
  • Day 2 operations
  • Post-close separation execution
  • Standalone operating model
  • Application and dependency analysis
  • Data migration strategy
  • TSA exit
  • Private-equity portfolio company

Separation readiness, before the close date sets the pace.

A separation readiness review establishes what the business actually consumes from its parent — the analysis every downstream decision depends on.

Request a Readiness Review →