Vista Equity Partners, the private equity firm that
currently owns meetings and travel management technology provider Lanyon and
that entered into an agreement in April to acquire meetings tech leader Cvent, has
continued its 2016 buying spree with an agreement to acquire marketing
automation firm Marketo for $1.79 billion. Here's why it matters to event
managers.
Attendee engagement wars have reached a fever pitch among meetings
technology providers. Mobile meetings app startups like Bizzabo, DoubleDutch
and QuickMobile have challenged what the industry might consider old guard technology
providers like Cvent, Lanyon and Etouches by introducing modern mobile user interfaces
and focusing on the social and sharing aspects of onsite attendee engagement rather
than on event operations management.
The value of mobile and onsite event technology has not been
lost on the established players. Cvent was the first of the majors to invest in
a mobile-focused events company, acquiring CrowdCompass in 2012. Lanyon
followed, acquiring GenieMobile in December 2014 and Etouches made its mobile
move just last year, acquiring TapCrowd in July.
Cvent president of worldwide sales and marketing Chuck
Ghoorah told BTN in October that the meetings
tech leader was shifting its strategy: "We are moving squarely into onsite
event technology: our mobile apps, social walls, polling, etc. It used to be
that event tech was all back-office operations; it's great but a thankless job.
When the C-level sees the interaction now possible and they see how meetings
professionals are connecting the brands with clients and partners, they get
excited and they want to fund it more."
As mobile startups predicted, social channel interactions,
sharing and hyperlocal attendee-tracking data have moved to the heart of the
live event strategy. Not only do event managers and marketers want the ability
to capture aggregate activity data throughout the event to identify engagement,
hot topic sessions and powerful speakers, but they also want to track activity
back to individual attendees to show specific engagement rates, which
ultimately can be linked to a meetings return on investment.
Underscoring that shift, Cvent just last week reconfigured
its social activity feed as a launch icon in its mobile app, making that data
feed immediately available to the user, rather than burying it in the personal
tool set.
Even so, for most event managers, it's challenging to use attendee-engagement
data to enhance longer-term sales leads or track sales conversions back to
specific user activities. In a white paper published in February, QuickMobile called
live meetings a "black hole" in terms of attendee data and advocated
for mobile event app integration with enterprise systems—the Oracles and SAPs
of the world—in order to unmask the power of attendee-engagement data. QuickMobile
predicted such integrations would happen this year. And so they have.
Bizzabo and DoubleDutch both announced sales and marketing automation
system integrations in May. Bizzabo announced integration with Salesforce,
MailChimp and project management system Slack. DoubleDutch
announced integration with Marketo and Salesforce. A spokesperson for Cvent
told BTN via email that CrowdCompass
had been integrating with Salesforce and Marketo "for years."
Marketo &
DoubleDutch
DoubleDutch has been particularly aggressive in marketing
its new integration capabilities. In mid-May, the company declared "the
end of the event tech era" and the rise of what it termed "Live Engagement Marketing." The relevancy challenge was aimed directly at established
meetings tech providers with language that echoed a
blog post by CEO Lawrence Coburn that openly questioned the innovation
trajectories of Cvent and Lanyon, given the Vista Equity acquisitions. In his
blog, Coburn cited private equity's habit of focusing on lean operations and financials
at the cost of innovation.
Central to its Live Engagement Marketing push, DoubleDutch has
played up its tight partnership with Marketo. The meetings app provider
launched its Live Engagement platform at Marketo's Marketing Nation event
in Las Vegas last month and has powered the Marketing Nation mobile app for the
past two years. The DoubleDutch-Marketo integration has been the centerpiece of
a seven-city marketing road show for DoubleDutch that hit New York City and
Washington, D.C. in May and has dates scheduled for Chicago, Toronto, Amsterdam,
London and Frankfurt.
Coburn told BTN
prior to the Live Engagement Marketing launch in Las Vegas that DoubleDutch
expected to lead the event-data revolution. "I'm speaking frankly, but we've
focused on this for two-and-a-half years. We've earned the right because we've
built up such a huge data set. And now we can use that data set to help our
customers run better programs and drive business results across their
organizations," he said.
Largely hitching its wagon to Marketo in the innovation race,
however, DoubleDutch may feel the sting of the Marketo acquisition announcement:
Its first marketing automation partner likely will sit side-by-side in a
portfolio with its older and more established rivals.
Vista Equity Acquisition
Moves Toward End-to-End Solution
In a sense, Vista has paid the highest compliment to the
DoubleDutch strategy, suggested meetings technology consultant Corbin Ball. "This
is the whole Live Engagement platform that DoubleDutch has been pushing,"
he said. "But ultimately this is where everyone should be going in terms
of integrating events into a more comprehensive business strategy. The fact
that Vista Equity Partners has recognized this, too … it's hugely significant
for our market. It's a brilliant move."
Asked whether DoubleDutch—and other external partners—would now
be at a disadvantage in terms of integration progress with Marketo, Ball said
it would be more logical for Vista to focus resources on internal solutions
before supporting outside partners. "Under the same umbrella, they can really
take the time to move forward with the sales and marketing automation piece. It's
a real sign that we are moving to a more frictionless economy by figuring out
the details of how to manage data through the lifecycle."
That said, barring other meetings apps from
tapping into that opportunity with Marketo would be shortsighted, Ball said. "I
would be surprised if [Vista Partners] put up big barriers when the bigger
picture is that you want all the other companies to be integrating, as well."