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Thursday, February 18, 2010
N.H. High Tech Council merges with Software Association of N.H.
By Rodney H. Brown
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The New Hampshire High Technology Council reports it has merged with the Software Association of New Hampshire, creating what officials call a “single voice for the state’s high technology community.”
As part of the merger, three SwANH board members have joined the tech council’s board of directors. They are Dave Todaro, vice president of Bid2Win Software Inc. in Portsmouth and chairman of SwANH; Dana Lariviere, president and CEO of Chameleon Group LLC in Portsmouth; and Mike Melville, CEO of IntelliSoft Group Inc. in Nashua.
After the merger, the tech council has just fewer than 300 members, according to council president Fred Kocher.
“We have 220 in the high tech council and the last count I heard from SwANH was that they had 64, so give or take a few, we are in the 280 range,” he said.
SwANH has been in existence for 16 years with a focus on software companies in the Granite State. The NHHTC has been around for 27 years and has a broader mandate of reaching out to all technology sectors in New Hampshire. As SwANH was managed almost entirely by its board, no staff members will be added to the tech council, Kocher said.
According to NHHTC officials, all SwANH members are now full members in the NHHTC. SwANH will become a software-focused special interest group within the tech council. It will still offer some of the events SwANH members have become accustomed to, such as the workshop forums and the annual events, Kocher said.
Creating SwANH as a special interest group would make it the first such sub-category within the council, Kocher said, but it may not be the last.
“Perhaps there will be other groups within the high tech council that will want to concentrate on the issues indigenous to their sector,” he said. “And that is something we will do if there are enough companies in the sector.”
New Hampshire’s merging of tech organizations follows a similar move made in November when the Mass Technology Leadership Council Inc. reported its merger with the Massachusetts Network Communications Council. The combined organization was intended to make a super-group of tech, bringing together consumer and enterprise software, hardware, robotics, Internet commerce, network devices, network management and security software, and mobile software and hardware.
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