CHICAGO — Event technology continues to be a top focus for trade show and event organizers as they seek a more seamless experience for their teams and for exhibitors and attendees at their shows.
Maritz, a company designed to meet the demand for smoother journeys in 2025, now brings the acquisition of Convention Data Services under its brand.
trade show director Chatted with Maritz leadership about the progress of the integration with Convention Data Services, their priorities for 2025 and what show organizers should focus on in 2025.
Better together
The integration of Convention Data Services (CDS) and the Maritz brand is ongoing and has been making significant progress since the acquisition was announced in July 2024. The transaction brings together two strong competitors and sets in motion an integration process that includes retaining the best of each company to continue delivering the strongest value proposition to customers.
“We know that we will be better together than CDS and Maritz are; better in terms of talent, better aligned in terms of our culture, and that certainly applies to our technology.” Maritz Chief Technology Officer John Wahle said. “Our strategy is to choose the best of the two because both CDS and Maritz have amazing capabilities. We will start with our customers and their perspective to determine how we will move to ‘better together’ solutions program. Over time, we will adopt these capabilities from both teams, and we will develop a roadmap on how we will do this. ”
The company is gradually implementing this strategy and has begun rolling out initiatives to bring value to customers quickly and seamlessly.
“We focus on data first. We have reporting tools and analytics, CDS also has these visualization tools and analytics, and we’ve incorporated them into our customer portal, which we’ll be showcasing this week at Expo! Expo! We’re adopting components and building them together, and we got really good feedback,” said Aaron Dorsey, vice president of product management at Maritz. “Another area of reporting that we have implemented at our shows since September is that Maritz has a live dashboard that shows real-time check-in visualizations so show organizers can see what is happening at the event from their mobile device. CDS This area had never been focused on, so we made it available to CDS customers almost immediately (about two months after the acquisition).”
related. Maritz acquires conferencing data services
new features
Maritz plans to introduce new features to the market to expand its existing products.
“Our customers are used to Maritz being a very bespoke shop, we offer a white glove service and are experts in very complex techniques. What we are also focusing on in the future is to provide our customers with more tools to work directly with to suit the right type of event SaaS-type platforms compete,” Dorsey said. “We are bringing a more comprehensive SaaS offering to the market so customers can set it up and manage it themselves, but we will always provide the custom, comprehensive white-glove service that everyone has come to expect from us. We know this is a big needs, as the events our customers host have different technical and support needs.”
With a strong focus and passion for community engagement through live events, Maritz has also enhanced its digital backpacking solutions.
“We have a product called the Digital Backpack that’s already established in the market, and now we’re also launching a new feature called the Digital Tote that allows show organizers to deliver content as guests check in to the event,” “Dorsey said. “Our next phase is to allow attendees to exchange contact information very seamlessly and then all the information is in the same place, so you can really track your entire journey as an attendee. That will start building out more features like community suggestions Things you should do at the event and people you might want to meet. We really want to measure this and see how attendees adopt it because that’s not the traditional way they receive information at an event.”
Cybersecurity at the forefront
By 2025, as technology and personalization evolve, cybersecurity and privacy are top of mind, and Maritz is ensuring they stay ahead of the concerns and threats in this space.
“We view cybersecurity and privacy as equally important as our event technology capabilities. It’s very fundamental. In this case, both organizations will use a similar approach in terms of how they identify and mitigate risk. That’s Maritz “The advantage is that we are part of a larger Maritz organization that has a very strong security program, including a strong set of policies and standards, with strong talent managing our risk mitigation approach,” said Wahle. “We have up to 15 dedicated cybersecurity professionals in Maritz, including several dedicated to event spaces, so they can be directed to trade show customer and attendee data, ensuring it is protected and owned An ecosystem of risk-reducing technologies that protects us from malware and ransomware risks.”
Simplify data sharing
In a traditional data strategy approach, both customers and providers may share the same data back and forth, potentially resulting in multiple copies of the same data being stored in multiple locations.
To address this, Maritz’s data strategy involves a cloud data sharing approach, meaning Maritz manages data from registrations, attendee data, and exhibitor data, all stored in a public, secure location in the cloud. In addition to being more convenient, this also makes the data more secure since role-based access is possible.
“It’s more secure and allows for better management, auditing and understanding of who is actually manipulating the data than sending it through an integration and making a copy. Those copies can be intercepted, so you need to encrypt it on both sides, So having security governance in the cloud does make things easier,” Dorsey said.
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