Any business contemplating an acquisition, a strategic investment, a partnership or even a critical competitive plan will almost certainly want to retain a third party to conduct an objective “due diligence” investigation. Properly executed, the due diligence process will critically evaluate the financial, management and operational conditions of a company, agency or project. Proper due diligence is critical to developing an accurate valuation. It also helps managers to identify, assess and prioritize long term risks and to understand better the structural issues that affect the long-term prospects of the business.

Unfortunately conventional conventional due diligence approaches often do not include a proper evaluation of a company's technology, preferring either to bypass the issue or to defer technical assessments to third parties who generally limit their work to functional product testing.

In today's technology-intensive business environment, this approach is no longer acceptable, because so much business risk is connected to technical issues. Proper technical due diligence should be a central element of any business analysis. Ignyt's approach puts technical due diligence at the heart of our process. It not only evaluates a company's technical assets, it also connects those to business operations and to the the broader marketplace in which the business operates.

Ignyt’s Technical Due Diligence team asks more than simply, “Does the company's software or hardware work as claimed?” We ask how well it interoperates with products already on the market. We determine if there are operating standards which will impede market acceptance. We investigate whether it represents true innovation in the marketplace. We assess how secure the business's claims are to its intellectual property and its probable risks of infringement. We try to project the demand curve for this technology and assess whether there are other engineering developments on the horizon which which could render this technology obsolete. We conduct in-depth reviews of personnel to determine whether the company has the technical staff needed to build on the technology and the extent to which the tech team is empowered to drive innovation at the company. We evaluate how well the marketing and technical/engineering teams work together. Answers to these questions help us assess both a company's technology and provide insight as to how technical issues are likely to affect business performance and profitability.

Technical Due Diligence should be an important part of any merger, acquisition or strategic partnership for another reason: assessing technical compatibility. While differing business environments can learn to work together, unidentified or unresolved differences in technology infrastructure can be devastating. We can evaluate the relevant technological issues, and the risks they pose to your bottom line and the likely costs of integration. We can also help you develop a strategy that will minimize the impact of technical incompatibilities while moving towards a more streamlined architecture.