McGettigan Partners Up For Meetings, Tech
<B> McGettigan Partners Up For Meetings, Tech</B>
By Chris Davis
With an eye on increasing its clout among West Coast-based computer and technological corporations, McGettigan Partners has acquired a San Francisco-based meeting planning firm with a client list rife with some of the largest.
Philadelphia-based McGettigan last month bought Meetings Plus of San Francisco and will merge the company with its own Bay Area office to form McGettigan Meetings Plus.
The move offers McGettigan an entry point into the high-tech market. McGettigan's primary clients are large pharmaceutical firms, like Eli Lilly & Co. (<I>Meetings Today</I>, Feb. 23, 1998) Bayer Corp., Bristol-Myers Squibb and the pharmaceutical division of Procter & Gamble Co. (<I>Meetings Today</I>, June 7).
McGettigan officials believe that some of the larger, more mature computer hardware and software companies are ready to take on meetings consolidation. "There's a real interest in the high-tech sector, and they need better ways to manage their meetings spend," said Meetings Plus founder and president Carolyn West, who will head the new entity. "I don't think some of the startups are ready, but there are a whole lot of area companies that need it and have been asking about it. We couldn't provide it then, but now we can."
While Meetings Plus does not handle the consolidation of corporate meetings programs, as does McGettigan, it will offer its clients McGettigan's Core Discovery software. Meetings Plus' clients, which retained the company primarily for user conferences and other large meetings, include Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
The concept of consolidating meetings and group travel to improve negotiations with suppliers and decrease spending is still relatively new. McGettigan executive vice president Christine Duffy, to whom West will report, said it's primarily been a domain of older, more established corporations in industries not as quick-changing as technology.
"We've called on West Coast technological firms for more than five years to gauge their interest," Duffy said. "Part of the reason those firms (have been slow to embrace consolidation) is that technology moves so fast that many companies don't have their infrastructure entirely in place. Consolidation is still a new concept for them. But today, people are more accepting of the concept of getting their arms around meeting spend."
Duffy and West said McGettigan's technology-driven solutions could be attractiveto an industry in which many mergers and acquisitions have created huge companies without highly efficient meetings programs.
The Core Discovery software, McGettigan's technological consolidation tool which the company recently announced it will sell on the open market through its new Star-Cite spinoff (<I>Meetings Today</I>, Jan. 25), could offer the company a leg up if large technological firms decide to consolidate.