I think the hardest part of this is getting over all of the immediate thoughts like:

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OK. So the bean-counters sat down with some other bean-counters and decided that there were enough beans here to make some money.

To them, all of the staff there (and here for that matter) are "beans".

They don't really understand what's going on internally in the aquired company (or again, at their own company, but let's not get into that); things have been going wrong there for some time now.

The DBA is probably one of many people who saw the handwriting on the wall and jumped ship. The ones who are left are the less-valuable staff who didn't think they could find work elsewhere.

The vice-president has given you no warning whatsoever - a competent manager would have pulled key IT staff aside before the meeting and warned them rather than having them shoot from the hip at a big meeting. You're dealing with a total moron. Unfortunately, a powerful one...

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Once you've flushed all of that from the queue of items to come out of your mouth, you ask for the chance to get in there and do some analysis. The people suggesting that the human element needs to be addressed definitely get my nod, although understand that you're dealing with upper-level managers who don't understand anything about that, so be careful.