Stu Shea, president, CEO and chairman of Peraton and a 2021 Wash100 winner, said he believes adding Northrop Grumman’s (NYSE: NOC) information technology services business and Perspecta (NYSE: PRSP) would better position Peraton in the federal IT services market, the Washington Business Journal reported Friday.
“Where Peraton will land is, we will be in the top three in terms of size, but I think we’re going to be even higher up in terms of impact. Scale isn’t everything, but scale with a purpose or scale with focus matters,” Shea said during a WBJ virtual forum in February.
“We had a strategy that said our core markets need to evolve into citizen services, federal security, financial markets, right? The things that are all interconnected today. … There’s not much out there that we can’t take on now,” he added.
Peraton’s private equity owner Veritas Capital completed its acquisition of Northrop’s IT and mission support business in February. In late January, Veritas struck an all-cash deal worth $7.1 billion for Perspecta with plans to merge the latter with Peraton.
When asked about integrating Perspecta and Northrop’s IT arm amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Shea said Peraton was ready for it because the company has done it before. He also cited the importance of having an “unemotional view” as Peraton goes through the integration process and works to establish best-in-class teams, tools, processes and systems.
“In any acquisition, you buy it for a reason — growth and synergy and interoperability of the people and the tools and the systems. We are dispassionate or unemotional about those decisions, but we’re passionate about the business,” Shea explained.
“So as we looked at leaders, we take a step back from it and say, ‘What are the best-in-class people? What are the best-in-class teams that we can create? What are the best-in-class systems and tools and processes?’ And then if you have that unemotional view, you will make choices that will benefit the enterprise,” he noted.
