CHICAGO — Event technology continues to be a top focus for trade show and event organizers, as they look for more seamless experiences for their teams, and their shows’ exhibitors and attendees.
One company aiming to meet the demand of more frictionless journeys in 2025 is Maritz, which now includes the acquired Convention Data Services under its brand.
Trade Show Executive spoke with leadership at Maritz about how the integration with Convention Data Services is going, what they’re prioritizing in 2025 and what show organizers should keep an eye out for in 2025.
Better Together
The integration of Convention Data Services (CDS) into the Maritz brand is underway and has been making significant progress since the July 2024 announcement of the acquisition. The deal brought together two powerhouse competitors and started an integration process that involves keeping the best of the best from each company to continue moving forward with the strongest value proposition for customers.
“We know we’re going to be better together relative to CDS and Maritz coming together; better in terms of talent, better together in terms of our culture and that certainly applies to our technology,” said John Wahle, Chief Technology Officer at Maritz. “Our strategy is, because CDS and Maritz each have amazing capabilities, to pick the best of both. We’re going to start with our clients and their perspectives in forming how we’re going to move to a ‘better together’ solution. Over time, we’ll adopt those capabilities from both teams, and we’ll have a roadmap that articulates how we’re going to do that. In the end we’re going to have one set of event technology.”
The company is approaching this strategy incrementally and has already started to roll things out to bring value to customers quickly and seamlessly.
“We’re starting with a focus on data. We have reporting tools and analytics and CDS has these visualization tools and analytics, and we’ve already combined them to our client portal, and we’re showing that this week at Expo! Expo! We’re taking components and building them together, and we’re getting really good feedback,” said Aaron Dorsey, Vice President of Product Management at Maritz. “Another area in reporting that we’ve already implemented with shows going back to September is Maritz has an on-site dashboard that shows real time check-in visualizations, so show organizers can see what’s happening at their event from their mobile device. CDS had never had a focus in that area, so we brought that to CDS clients almost immediately, about two months after the acquisition.”
Related. Maritz Acquires Convention Data Services
New Capabilities
Maritz is planning to bring new capabilities to the market that expands upon their existing offerings.
“Our clients are used to Maritz as a very custom shop, and we are a white-glove service and experts in very complex technology. Where we’re also focusing on in the future is giving more tools to our clients directly to compete with SaaS type platforms that are the right fit for the right type of event,” Dorsey said. “We’re bringing to market an offering that’ll be more full SaaS, so clients can do their own set-up and management, but we’re always going to have that custom, full white-glove service that everybody expects from us. We understand that’s a big need because our clients have events that have different technology and support needs.”
With a heightened focus and passion for fostering community engagement through live events, Maritz is also enhancing its Digital Backpack solution.
“We have a product called Digital Backpack that was already established in the market, and we have now released a new feature called Digital Tote, which allows a show organizer to deliver content when a guest checks in to an event,” Dorsey said. “Our next phase is allowing attendees to exchange contact information very seamlessly, and then it’s all located in the same place, so you’re really tracking your entire journey as an attendee. This will start to build more capabilities like community recommendations on things you should do at the event and people you might want to meet. We really want to measure that and see how attendees adopt it because it’s not traditionally how they’ve received information at an event.”
Cybersecurity at the Forefront
In 2025, cybersecurity and privacy are top of mind as technology and personalization evolve, and Maritz is making sure they stay ahead of concerns and threats in this area.
“We treat the world of cybersecurity and privacy as just as important as our event tech capabilities. It’s very foundational. In this case, both organizations are going to use a similar approach in terms of how we identify and mitigate risk. This is where Maritz has a strength because we’re part of a larger Maritz organization that has a very robust security program, everything from a strong set of policies and standards that governs our approach to risk mitigation with a strong set of talent,” Wahle said. “We have as many as 15 dedicated cybersecurity professionals across all of Maritz, including several that are dedicated to the events space, so directing that to trade show client and attendee data, making sure data is protected and having the technology ecosystem that mitigates the risk, protects us from malware and ransomware risks.”
Streamlining Data Sharing
In a traditional approach to data strategy, clients and providers may all share the same data back and forth, which has the potential to result in multiple copies of the same data stored in multiple locations.
To combat this issue, Maritz’s data strategy involves a cloud data sharing approach, meaning that Maritz manages data from registration, attendee data and exhibitor data that is all stored in one common secure location in the cloud. Besides being more convenient, this also allows the data to be more secure, as there can be role-based access.
“It is more secure and provides better governance, auditing and understanding of who is actually manipulating the data, compared to sending it through an integration and making copies. Those copies could be intercepted, so you would need to encrypt it on both sides, so having that secure governance in the cloud really makes it easier,” Dorsey said.
