Officially I ran Openpath's finance, then Alta's. In practice I also owned the decisions that sat between sales, product and finance, because the business needed someone looking at it whole.
Motorola bought a fast-growing cloud access business that sold through installers. It had to keep growing while it was folded in.
Keep the integration funded, keep the economics in front of leaders, and fix what slowed sales before what could hurt growth.
Openpath beat its deal model, its leaders stayed, and the hardest moves were under way when I stepped into a new role.
The integration budget sat in the year of the deal, and we closed in July. Some of it carried into the next year; most did not. I funded what mattered from our own operating budget and cut elsewhere to keep it moving.
Openpath sold hardware followed by a subscription that customers kept renewing. Most of Motorola's businesses sold one-time licenses, and the deal case modeled Openpath that way. When sales leaders from the on-premise business took over Openpath's sellers, cloud had to compete for attention inside its own team.
First, I changed how reseller discounts worked so Openpath matched the rest of the portfolio. Two harder calls waited, so we wouldn't hurt growth: retiring old customer plans, and a revenue-share arrangement that let small installers sell us. As the business grew, both got harder.
September 2025. Each customer moves at renewal, the least disruptive point for customers and installers.
The people who came with Openpath kept building after the deal, and that is a large part of why it beat its plan.
Openpath beat the revenue plan in Motorola's deal model. Its leaders stayed well past their holdback. The move off old plans was running when I left to build the recurring-revenue team in December 2025; the revenue-share decision was still open when I left Motorola in July 2026.
Agree up front on what finished looks like, and keep a written record of what's done, who owns it and where it stands, so whoever picks it up can carry it. And plan the timeline in years.
I take ownership when it isn't assigned, and I protect the value of an acquired business while the people and budgets around it change.
Motorola Solutions bought Openpath in July 2021. Openpath sold cloud access control through installers who resell it: hardware first, then a subscription customers kept renewing. It kept growing quickly after the deal, which was good for the business and made every integration decision bigger the longer it waited.
Officially, Openpath's finance, and then Alta's. Nobody was assigned to own the integration, and there was no integration office. Early on, I watched each team pulled toward its own home: sales toward the sales organization, product toward engineering. I had come in as part of Openpath's leadership, and I saw myself as a steward of the business as a whole and of its people. So I kept owning the decisions that sat between teams.
At our CEO's request, the Openpath team studied the businesses we were joining before changing anything: how they decided and who they served. Most of Openpath's leaders stayed well past their three-year holdback, and several were asked to lead larger parts of the portfolio. That kept the teams under them together, and kept them building the way they had before the deal.
Openpath beat the revenue plan in Motorola's deal model. The move off old plans was running when I left to build the recurring-revenue team in December 2025. The revenue-share decision was still open when I left Motorola in July 2026.
The business is where you set out to take it, and nothing is waiting on a team to do a thing.
Agree up front on what finished looks like, and keep a written record of what's done, who owns it and where it stands, so whoever picks it up can carry it. And plan the integration timeline in years.