A maturing tech ecosystem.
As markets mature, you can usually expect a growing number of mergers and acquisitions (aka M&A) alongside a continued spike in fundraising and VC activity.
The workspace tech sector (ie the technology used to manage, run and fill workspaces) appears to be hitting its next big maturity point, as can be highlighted in just this week’s market moves.
In the first two days of this week, we’ve already seen:
OfficeRnD announced a $10M series A.
HqO acquired Office App.
All three are great milestones for the 5 companies involved, and will probably provide massive net positives for the companies and spaces who use their technology.
It’s definitely worth noting that as markets mature, so do the solutions within them. Funding, VC attention and ‘exits’ (through M&As) attract attention, interest and ultimately lead to better technology, options, services and insights.
However, acquisitions and fundraises like these do often raise a bunch of questions from the folks actually tasked with setting up, running and filling office spaces.
In this post, we’ll quickly explore 3 of these burning questions, with regards to how changed like these could affect business continuation and your Operational Stack.
A platform we use raised a bunch of cash. That's great... right?
Yeap. That can be great news!
Raising capital usually means that others believe in what is being built, and are literally diving in to fund their expansion of market share and/or feature development.
There is a never-ending debate around whether raising outside capital is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ approach to scaling tech businesses, but the fact is, a lot of the time – cash raised goes directly into pushing growth.
Platforms growth, both in number of customers and in number of features, can sometimes present a number of challenges for the workspace operators who rely on them.
With an influx of new customers, there can often create a spike in new feature requests and support enquiries, stretching the team’s attention as more features & integrations are added.
Often, recently capitalized companies will hire fast, fleshing out their tech and support teams to handle this growth.
If not managed carefully, time spent on planning, designing, developing and then maintaining new integrations could distract talented dev teams from improving core systems or adding new features quickly.
Rarely, these delays can damage the effectiveness of the platform itself, or cause issues for the businesses who rely on the tech for day-to-day operations.
So, whilst funding can definitely be good news, it’s worth keeping an eye on what’s been added, updated and how they’re being supported moving forward.
A platform we use got acquired. What changes now?
Immediately? Well… usually nothing, straight away.
Almost every acquisition will keep the current platform, pricing and features in place as they work towards either improving or merging offerings for both sets of customers.
We can’t speak for either pair of acquisitions in this week’s news, but the two main routes from previous M&A activity in the Workspace Tech sector are either a gradual merger, or continuing to run both platforms independently with some kind of centralized billing.
Should there be a merger of platforms, workspace operators and their teams should proactively check out any any integrations and automations being used for any possible breaking changes.
The last thing you want is for a workflow, or few, across your Operational Stack to suddenly crash, leaving potential customers, existing tenants or their businesses locked out, or unable to leverage your critical amenities.
Of course, 99% of the time tech companies will absolutely nail the handover and there’d be no immediate risk of any workflows, or anything else, breaking. And we’re sure this will be the case with the acquisitions announced this week.
However, when things do need reconfiguring, that’s where one of the benefits of middleware like Syncaroo kicks in. Workspace operators and integrators can often just log in, and then point-and-click to swap or reconfigure integrations or automations across their operational stack.
Argh! What if we just developed an integration with XYZ?!
As mentioned previously, your custom integrations shouldn’t break right away.
Or at least not straight away.
We would definitely recommend keeping in touch with the tech support teams, and keeping an eye on any published developer documentation, so you can stay ahead of any breaking changes, server moves or credential resets.
Often, these are updated with enough notice and information to keep things ticking along nicely
Platforms and developers building on top of Syncaroo’s middleware infrastructure have it a little easier. They can instead rely on both our tech, and our team, to handle the heavy lifting of making sure everything keeps working and syncing as changes are planned and released.
Our team continue to monitor for platform updates, new features being added, breaking changes and schema adjustments, and then make sure operators and integrators get as much power as possible packed into a single unified API.
