Score one for Mass Tech Leadership Council
It feels like the end of the telecom era in Massachusetts this morning, as the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council takes over the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, which over the past few years had been idling.
They're calling it a merger, but ...
... Tom Hopcroft, president of MassTLC, will remain president of the new group. Mark Horan, formerly chief of MassNetComms, will be a senior vice president. Aside from Horan, the two staffers who'd been helping to run MassNetComms won't join MassTLC. (Horan said they've already found other jobs.)
... About two-thirds of the 500 corporate members of the combined entity will come from MassTLC, with MassNetComms bringing the minority.
... And the Mass Network Communications name will disappear, as will most of MassNetComms' annual events.
Steve O'Leary, the chairman of MassTLC, said the idea to blend the two trade associations started gestating last February at MassTLC's annual meeting.
"We had a panel on cloud computing, and you just couldn't ignore that the network and the software were starting to converge," said O'Leary, a former investment banker who recently left an entrepreneur-in-residence gig at General Catalyst to go off and do a new start-up.
O'Leary invited Steve Krom, an AT&T exec who is chairman of MassNetComms, to lunch at General Catalyst's Cambridge offices over the summer.
"We mapped out our respective organizations, and saw that there was tremendous alignment in how they were structured," O'Leary said.
The combination of the two groups is a real coup for Hopcroft, who joined Mass TLC in 2005, when his own trade association (the New England Business and Technology Association, formerly the Mass Electronic Commerce Association) merged with what was then the Mass Software Council, run by Joyce Plotkin.
"This organization will have the scale to be the go-to organization for the tech industry," Hopcroft said. "The boundaries between the old councils just don't make sense any more."
But what about MITX, the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange? I asked, which focuses on digital media, online advertising, and social media? Well, that boundary, Hopcroft and O'Leary assert, still makes sense.
Hopcroft says that Mass TLC will include networking topics - especially mobile and video - in its calendar of events, as well as its annual meetings and awards ceremony (the latter of which takes place this Thursday.) A few dozen MassNetComms board members will join Mass TLC's board.
MassNetComms was originally founded in 1992 as the Mass Telecommunications Council.
"The people there at the formation were folks like Ed Markey and Bill Weld and Steve Levy, who was running BBN then," Horan recalled. "Paul Severino still hadWellfleet, and Eric Giler had Brooktrout. Bruce Sachs was at Cascade."
Most of those companies have since been acquired.
Giler, who once served as the group's chairman and is still on the board of MassNetComms, agreed with my assertion that networking infrastructure companies are not as dominant on the state's technology landscape as they once were, though he said there's still lots of activity in mobile communications. But Giler has gravitated away from the networking industry, and is now chief executive at WiTricity, in Watertown, a developer of wireless charging systems.
"I think [this merger] is less a function of how the association was doing, and more a function of the industry," Giler said. "The 90s were a much more vibrant time for telecom and networking in Massachusetts."
Scott Kirsner writes the Innovation Economy blog on Boston.com. To read Kirsner's blog, please click here.
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