Essar Oil-Rosneft deal: How IT enabled the transition

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions (M&A), the bigger the company is, the more risk it involves. Now picture this: A USD 12.9 billion acquisition of India-based Essar oil by a consortium led by Russia’s state-owned oil titan Rosneft. 

The massive deal between the energy giants was completed in August 2017, which included the sale of the 20 million ton refinery at Vadinar, Gujarat, a captive power plant, port and over 3,500 petrol pumps. 

The complicated part was not only the logistics of the deal, but the fact that Essar Oil, being an Essar Group company, shared the IT technologies and resources with it. 

And this had to be separated out because of the M&A. 

Changing course 

The goal was to address business requirements and ensure independent control of IT assets by Essar Oil. 

Before the transition, all the data resided on common infrastructure, which needed to be migrated to a new datacenter. 

“The highlight of this project happens to be the criticality and varied technology aspects involved in the migration of the data,” points out Subhash Shelke, VP-IT at Essar Steel. 

The first task was to identify the crown jewels that needed to be moved. “The corporate IT team identified five areas of IT technologies, which would be involved during the transition,” he says.

The five areas were: IT networks, SAP landscapes, hardware and systems, HR/ESS/MSS and Web and SharePoint.

In-house teams’ core expertise and diversity of knowledge powered all migration tasks involved during the project, Shelke points out.

Integrating processes and people 

Shelke points out that the entire process of IT transition included two critical phases: Server migration and company code migration. 

The criticality and time sensitivity of an M&A demands hyper vigilance during planning and operations. “The corporate IT team prepared a vigilant project plan, followed by smart execution strategies to meet deadlines,” he adds. 

Apart from the IT team, business users and the human resource department were involved in the transition of IT resources. 

“The M&A of Essar Oil and Rosneft brought together different people, processes and technology with a common purpose of creating a larger and unified enterprise,” Shelke adds.