I saw this on another site, but thought you'd like it...

I work for a company that acquired two of its competitors about a year apart. The first purchase was a company much like us that I'll call GoodCo. The integration was not without issue, but overall, it went smoothly.

And so I was lulled into a false sense of security when I heard about the acquisition of the other company that we'll call BadCo. Because we had just integrated GoodCo’s network the year before, I was not too worried about repeating the process with BadCo's. That is, until I learned BadCo had outsourced its entire IT department to a large TLA (three-letter acronym) company.

Well, the honeymoon was over with this one. Nothing came easily with the BadCo integration. Instead of a couple of techie guys discussing the best way to redistribute routes and coming to a gentleman's agreement, BadCo had a process that required paperwork for all manner of inane minutiae and nothing was free. It was all about billable hours, of course. If the TLA had been good, the fees would have been acceptable, but TLA was not good. They just didn't grasp the obvious. We spent days troubleshooting the simplest problems.

Once, when we couldn't get people at a site to connect to a server, even though they could ping it, we were sure it was a firewall rule. I specifically asked for logs from the suspect firewall but was denied access and the problem dragged on with mind-numbing delays. Three days later, they found the problem. They explained it as a rule change in a firewall. They acted surprised. I did not. Thank goodness for the mute button.

One TLA guy earned the nickname Captain Obvious for his skill at restating our descriptions of problems. If I said, "There's a firewall rule blocking server connections," he would respond with, "There must be a rule in the firewall blocking clients from connecting to the server?"

Rest of story (only including a "fair use" excerpt above):
http://weblog.infoworld.com/offtherecord/archives/2008/05/third_party_in...