2026 megadeals and tech-heavy M&A transformations face a big ‘IT problem’

The early 2026 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) landscape is supercharged. While the total number of deals has dipped, the value has skyrocketed with companies focusing on transformative acquisitions. 

With sectors like technology, energy, life sciences, finance, and healthcare being the most active, companies and experts warn that the IT problem in M&A has never been more urgent. 

From incompatible tech stacks to different communication systems and digital environments, M&A deals that do not run smoothly on the IT side face disruption, loss of momentum, productivity losses, and compliance and security risks. 

IT Takes Center Stage as Megadeals Set the Pace for 2026

In its recent report, EY said that megadeals have rebounded as 2026 unfolds with deal value-led momentum in M&A activity. In technology, the M&A focus is on AI, autonomous mobility, FinTech infrastructure, and semiconductor innovation, while in energy, oil and gas, and chemicals, technology-driven optimization is top of mind. 

Similarly, technology is taking front row seats in the life science and healthcare industry with interest in platform-level capabilities, including in vivo chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T), circular RNA (circaRNA) therapeutics, and precision diagnostics, showing increased appetite. 

With such a heavy tech focus, the state of IT systems, through M&A to consolidations, will play a vital role.

“Organizations should not have to pick between moving fast and staying secure. Stellar Migrator for Exchange was built to do both, because during Mergers & Acquisitions, the business needs speed, and the IT team needs an airtight mailbox migration trail, and neither side should have to compromise,” Sunil Chandna, CEO, Stellar Data Recovery, told us. 

Stellar Data Recovery, has dedicated years to listening to administrators who handle mailbox migrations under intense time pressure and developed Stellar Migrator for Exchange to solve real-world challenges of scale, security, and reliability.

The success of a migration is measured by whether users notice it at all, he said. 

“When the transition is invisible to the organization, that’s when the technology has truly worked,” said Chandna.  

During acquisitions, companies often need to migrate mailboxes between different Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft 365 tenants. 

“Organizations don’t get any grace period after an M&A,” said Chandna. “Regulatory obligations don’t pause while two organizations are integrating”. Using software developed for these specific cases, IT teams can walk into an M&A triggered mailbox migration with a plan and walk out the other side with their data integrity intact, Chandna explained. 

Why IT is Business and Not an Afterthought  

In its 2026 Outlook Global M&A industry trends report, PwC notes that due diligence becomes deeper and more data-driven, as deal timelines accelerate, driven by AI, and become barely recognisable from what they used to be. The AI race is forcing M&A leaders to focus on critical capabilities such as cybersecurity. 

In another report, PwC said that IT services have taken centre stage as traditional outsourcing moves towards the orchestration of full-stack digital ecosystems. These ecosystems unify cloud, data, and AI capabilities into cohesive value propositions. 

Delayed integration of data estates and communication systems is a top reason why companies fail to see immediate ROI. 

Companies like Atlassian have already come face-to-face with the costs of IT problems in M&A. After acquiring Loom for $975 million in 2023, the company struggled for months to unify siloed workspace environments. 

“I think the biggest problem in IT integration is that it is considered a technical exercise rather than a business continuity initiative,” Sidharth Ramsinghaney, director of Strategy and Operations at Twilio, told us. 

Organizations typically underestimate how many interdependencies there are between systems, which have cascading impacts on the business processes associated with that, leading to cascading failures when legacy applications are decommissioned, Ramsinghany explained. 

“At the time of M&A, everyone, including the deal team, Corp Dev, integration team, and everyone else, is focused on what is the biggest value driver or what is the why behind that deal,” said Ramsinghaney. 

“They just assume that this communication-related stuff will just happen, and it is not considered the revenue unlock or the deal unlock; it is associated with inadequate planning, both the actual technical and business aspects of it,” he said. 

Communication systems disruption immediately creates productivity loss. It creates cultural friction precisely when organizations need to meet a high level of collaboration during integrations. 

“When simple things fail, like employees who can’t access historical emails, contact lists, or calendar integration during critical deal milestones, it signals that leadership did not plan it adequately,” said Ramsinghaney. 

“The real synergies happen when technology and people work together”, says Mariano Jurich, Senior Product Manager at Making Sense. He explains that successful transformations depend not only on systems integration but on how teams adopt and operationalize those changes. Talent, leadership alignment, and structured adoption strategies become critical to ensuring that technology investments actually translate into business value.

How Leaders Should Approach the M&A IT Problem, Experts Answer

Identifying and prioritizing IT and data debts and problems from the efficient and seamless integration of communications to more complex tech stack issues required, for example, to scale AI, should become a day-one readiness priority and not a post-close clean-up activity. Outsourcing and M&A tech stack migration software can bridge gaps if in-house resources are not adequately capable of handling the IT challenges of the acquisition of operations. 

“Leaders should treat communications and identity systems as critical infrastructure in M&A integration,” John Bruce, CISO at Quorum Cyber, a Microsoft-led MDR company, told us. 

“That means involving cybersecurity and IT teams early in the deal process, conducting technical due diligence on messaging environments, and planning identity, access, and security integration before day one,” said Bruce. 

When email, identity, and collaboration tools are integrated securely from the start, organizations dramatically reduce the risk of disruption or compromise, he added. 

“CTO should be engaged in the due diligence process instead of waiting until after signing contracts,” Dmitry Nazarevich, CTO of Innowise, an International IT and data migration company, told us. 

“If combined integration costs exceed anticipated synergy from acquisition, acquisition deals will likely not make sense,” said Nazarevich. “On the first day, the win is not to fully migrate databases but to make sure everyone can log into the system.” 

The Bottom Line 

Megadeals have set the M&A pace early in 2026, with outlooks showing similar continuations of the trend. AI and technology transformations are big areas of focus, and how acquisitions move to integrate tech stacks will be the difference between hitting the ground running or stalling. 

When even failures in simple communication systems can cause month-long disruptions, the IT problem becomes an urgent matter. As AI accelerates M&A deals, leaders focus on due diligence, knowing when tech priorities are a “business problem,” and M&A specific software and services.  

Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.