Three of the meeting industry's favorite techies — Corbin Ball, CMP; Rodman Marymor, CMP; and Jeff Rasco, CMP — have formed a new meetings technology consulting enterprise called Tech3 Partners (www.tech3partners.com).

Headquartered in Berkeley, Calif., where Marymor also runs Cardinal Communications, the new consultancy has three target markets: corporations, technology companies interested in creating or adapting products to the meeting market, and hotels, which want to ensure that they are communicating effectively with meeting clients.

Says Marymor, “Right now, the state of the industry and the saturation of new technology over the past 10 years demands that there be some expert guides” to help organizations figure out their needs, the technologies they should adopt, and how they should adopt them. “In particular,” he says, “on the corporate side, you've got procurement departments getting involved.” This means trying to find ways to combine meeting procurement and consolidation software with other systems that might already be installed throughout an enterprise.