But they can handle it, according to Ben Keeler, director at consultancy Citisoft. "JPMorgan has a complex architecture but they also have a lot of experience in this space," Keeler says. "Post-merger integration is something they’ve done before and they have an idea of what they want their future state to look like. I would never say an integration of this size is easy or simple, but they have the experience and are looking to fold in a lot of the Bear platform onto their own core systems."

The first task will be to determine what aspects of Bear Stearns' IT infrastructure are worth saving. Bear's prime brokerage operation has a good reputation on the Street and its correspondent clearing workstation has also earned high marks from analysts.

Keeler notes that when an acquiring firm assesses the technology assets of a target, it has to look at relationships as well as in-house people and infrastructure. Third-party applications, outsourcing providers, application service providers should all be considered. The acquirer should also reassess its own capabilities internally and with respect to third party providers. "A lot of backoffice outsourcing providers like to think they’re able to scale to meet any needs of your business, but a new book of business always has its unique twists and turns that may be difficult for existing providers to support," Keeler says.

JPMorgan execs will need to quickly perform forensics to find any skeletons in Bear Stearns' closet and figure out what's leveragable, Keeler says. "A lot of times, when people are collecting information about the technology assets of a company, they’re trying to get a feel for not only what’s the functionality, but also, does it have long life or will it need to be sunset in three to four years?" he says. "That’s not something that you can identify by talking to one or two people."

On a positive note, the broader trends over the last four years around adoption of SOA, better straight-through processing, standard messaging formats and improved communications between asset managers, service providers, custodians and brokers, help firms like JPMorgan and Bear to integrate their IT. "When you think about moving brokerage settlement from one platform to another, there’s work to be done but it’s not scary — there’s a known quantity of work," Keeler says.

Among the toughest challenges will be data — merging all the customer, pricing, trade and other types of data for the two firms will take two to four years, Keeler estimates. "It gets down to a lot of the soft stuff — data, relationships and governance — where it takes a long time to come up with and adopt a single platform or approach," he says.