Staff Report From Metro Atlanta CEO
Leapfrog Services, an IT leader in Atlanta, was selected by Cousins Properties, an Atlanta-based REIT, to ensure all technology services were properly maintained and managed during Cousins’ recent merger with Parkway Properties. The merger and related spin-off of the companies’ combined Houston-based assets, resulted in a myriad of IT needs and challenges, including the takeover of 19 new locations.
Leapfrog has years of success supporting companies during mergers, acquisitions and divestitures with a strong understanding of the regulatory environment for these types of deals and executing on information technology appropriately.
“Our goal for every client engagement is to ensure the IT operations are supporting the business operations” says Emmett “Trey” Hawkins, CTO of Leapfrog. “For a large-scale merger like Cousins and Parkway, the details can be extremely stressful, with timing and precision of data integration a crucial factor. Our partnership with the Cousins team involved elements of security, storage, and management of multiple locations.”
The full remit for Leapfrog included the set-up of a private cloud, data migration, network integration and multiple disaster recovery elements.
“Leveraging an outside IT partner like Leapfrog enabled us to scale up and down dependent on the business needs at the time,” said Brandon Van Orden, SVP, CIO of Cousins Properties. “Because of Leapfrog’s understanding in this kind of environment and excellence in service, we were able to service the needs of our internal and external customers during this period with the confidence that we were using best-in-class IT practices.”