The leaders of two of the biggest associations representing the information technology industry in Massachusetts—the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, better known as MassTLC, and the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, or MassNetComms—said today that the organizations are joining forces under the banner of MassTLC, the larger and more well recognized of the two.
“We can do more if we unite the tech sector and create the one go-to organization that has the resources to represent the whole sector,” says MassTLC president and CEO Tom Hopcroft, who will retain his title in the new merged organization.
MassTLC, formed in 2005 from the merger of the Massachusetts Software Council and the New England Business and Technology Alliance, has historically served large software sellers and buyers in the state. But it has been expanding lately into areas such as mobile technology and cloud computing that overlap with the domain of MassNetComms, which was founded in 1992 as the Massachusetts Telecommunications Council and represents companies in the telecom and networking sectors.
It was time to recognize that both organizations promote entrepreneurship and innovation, and that they could work more effectively together than apart, according to Mark Horan, executive director of MassNetComms, who will become a senior vice president within MassTLC. “We wanted to get to the point where we could have the size and scale to take on the big issues and go further with the things we are working on,” Horan says.
