The ubiquity of mobile devices among corporate meeting
attendees and increasing corporate acceptance of mobile apps as a vehicle to
disseminate information together are fueling what is perhaps the most rapidly
expanding sector of the corporate meetings industry: downloadable mobile apps
for attendees.
Such apps offer meeting organizers the ability to replace
paper agendas and other information with details in the app itself and quickly
make changes or additions to event information through pushed updates. They
also enable more immediate interaction between and among organizers and
attendees.
Very few corporations, however, develop downloadable apps
for their own meetings. As with many aspects of not only mobile but also
meetings technology, there is no shortage of suppliers willing to step in. And
many corporations that have explored using such apps have purchased them on an
ad-hoc basis, deploying apps only for their largest events or perhaps those
that involve customers or users.
But a more comprehensive meetings app model also is drawing
interest, one in which corporate users purchase the tools to generate in-house
their own downloadable apps. These can be branded with corporate logos while
providing company-specific information and the means to push notifications and
updates to attendees.
"I've seen a lot of traction and a lot of interest in
that," said BCD M&I director of technology solutions Arnold Lagos. "You're
able to brand the overall app for the company itself. I've seen a really big
need for that on the corporate side, because it offers a little bit more
control, and they can control who gets it without putting every meeting in the
app store."
Several startups and established meetings tech companies
have entered the space and now offer enterprisewide app construction
capabilities. Perhaps the largest, meetings technology supplier Cvent in 2012
acquired startup CrowdCompass to offer app technology. Meetings tech firm
Certain facilitates the construction of unlimited HTML5-based sites for events.
Startups, too, have gained market share. Canadian mobile
meetings technology firm QuickMobile secured C$3.2 million in funding, its
second such round in the past nine months, and CEO Patrick Payne in May told Business Travel News that demand for
enterprisewide meeting apps had far outstripped initial expectations. Such
other startups as GenieConnect offer similar services.
There are a few models for purchasing such technology,
depending on the functionalities users want, Payne said. "Then, it's
either using a sublicense, in which every time they create an event within the
master app there's a sublicense fee, or now some are moving toward much more of
a Software-as-a-Service model," he explained. "Well, both are SaaS
models, but some are looking at large numbers of events, so they are looking at
a model in which they just pay a monthly fee and then can use it as much as
they want."
Cvent CrowdCompass director of sales Matthew Donegan-Ryan
this year told BTN that pricing for
the company's enterprisewide app tool, which it released in February, is "based
on the size and complexity of the event, so it typically starts at about $5,900
and goes up from there. The majority of our clients pay a little less than
$10,000, but it varies. Historically, most of our clients have used us for
their two, three or four largest events, but now, since clients would be using
us for not just 1,000- and 5,000-person events but 50-person events, the cost
per event is going to come down significantly."
Currently, though, the purchasing process most companies
undertake for mobile meetings technology isn't necessarily formal, given how
new the sector is. "In fact, it's mainly the meetings manager saying, 'This
looks like a great tool, let's see if we can deploy it and use it,' " said
meetings management consultant Betsy Bondurant, president of Bondurant
Consulting. "I think we'll see more consistency in how it happens as
people get more used to using these apps."
This report
originally appeared in the August 2013 edition of Travel Procurement.