Mobile event app provider DoubleDutch has acquired meetings
and event registration and management technology Eventgrid for an undisclosed
amount. The acquisition marks a major strategy change as DoubleDutch fully
enters the event management space, making a stronger play for enterprise
clients. It also marks a major change in executive leadership for DoubleDutch.
Bryan Parker, who joined the company earlier this year as COO, will take over the CEO position from DoubleDutch founder Lawrence
Coburn. Coburn was named chief strategy officer and will oversee new product
launches.
Lawrence spoke to BTN late last year about the company's move
toward a more enterprise-focused strategy, saying DoubleDutch was looking to
partner with like-minded companies that would help them capture business farther
upstream in the event lifecycle. The Eventgrid acquisition shows the company
pushing in all its chips on a platform strategy after floundering with two
major layoffs in the last half of 2016.
DoubleDutch joins the crowd in a market that's moving decidedly
toward platform solutions to compete with Cvent. Etouches acquired Zentila
last June, bolting a sourcing solution onto its technology stack, then took
a majority stake investment from private equity to gain more financial backing,
plus a marketing automation portfolio partner. On the other end of the spectrum
is Event Tech Tribe, a group of five independent solutions that have banded together
as de facto meetings technology platform. DoubleDutch's move positions them to
compete with solutions like these; the differentiator, according to Coburn's
blog, is modern, scalable technology that is easy to use.
"Eventgrid was built by a team of very senior engineers
who had earned their stripes building some big, scalable, and well-known
systems," he wrote. "They wrote their first line of code for
Eventgrid in 2013, a computing lifetime away from the late '90s when the
industry incumbents were born."
That "industry incumbents" translates
to "Cvent" is no secret to anyone who has read Coburn's blogs in the past.
Whether the new platform will chip away at the incumbents' business remains to
be seen. Eventgrid, however, brought some of its own clients to the table,
including Sony and the International Association of Information and Data
Quality.