Poken acquired by GES

GES, a global full-service provider for live events, announced the purchase of Poken, a cloud-based event management platform founded 2007 in Switzerland. Poken brings together digital and physical event spaces to drive engagement and gain better insight through real data. Investors of Poken included Swiccom, Redalpine, SVC and business angels.

GES is one of the World’s 50 Largest Agency Companies and provides a wide-range of services, including official show services, audio visual, cutting-edge creative and design, marketing and measurement services, and event accommodations – all with an unrivaled global reach.

Collectively, GES and Poken support thousands of exhibitions and events throughout the world each year. With the addition of Poken, GES now offers the premier global events intelligence platform, focused on event registration and intelligent events.

Poken joins the N200|GES event intelligence team, and the company will retain the product name Poken 360°. Poken founder and CEO Stéphane Doutriaux and the global Poken team will join GES with offices in New York City, London, and Lausanne, Switzerland. The Poken team brings significant innovation capabilities, experience, and knowledge of intelligent events and will further extend the value GES brings to its clients and their attendees.

GES and Poken already work closely through a strategic partnership, providing clients with measurable and effective technology solutions for event registration and visitor engagement. N200|GES and Poken are currently integrated with plans to develop deeper integration with even greater customer benefits.

Together, the technology platforms further enhance engagement, streamline the management of events, and offer measurable insights for exhibition organizers, exhibitors and event sponsors. Event attendees benefit from Poken’s meeting scheduling. Attendees can maximize the effectiveness of their time by creating profiles that identify and match them with the most suitable people, as well as schedule meeting time slots.  Attendees are also able to receive product and service information digitally.

“The addition of Poken is a game-changer in providing a truly intelligent event for organizers, exhibitors, brands, and attendees,” added GES EVP of International, Jason Popp. “The extensive features and services offered by Poken create and drive engagement and are a natural complement to GES’ core live event services and robust technologies. Poken has an extremely talented and enthusiastic work force and we are happy to welcome them to our team.”

See the full press release and read more about Poken here