Cvent, the market leader in event management technology solutions, added even more muscle when it merged with Lanyon Solutions in November following the completion of the companies’ acquisition by private equity firm Vista Equity partners in a $1.65 billion deal.More Coverage
Meetings Today caught up with Cvent Founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal at the company’s Tysons Corner, Va., headquarters in mid-December, where the top staffs of both companies came together under the Cvent umbrella for its first “get-to-know-you” meeting that will serve as the launching pad for the combined companies’ future. The added firepower of Lanyon’s engineering team and other key positions should serve to increase Cvent’s domination of the cloud-based enterprise event, marketing and hotel management segment.
“We are going to be operating under the Cvent brand, and the Cvent leadership is going to be running the organization, so there’s clarity in the go-forward strategy,” Aggarwal said. “From a customer view, we have more than 25,000 customers between the two, and when you look at the users, it’s hundreds of thousands of users.”
The first order of business is to ensure this large customer base that it will be business as usual from the user experience with the products they’ve grown accustomed to.
“I’m sure the first question they’re going to want answered is, ‘Are my products going to be supported?’” Aggarwal said. “It’s all about the customers, and when you do a merger it doesn’t work unless you take care of your customers. We are going to continue to support all of the products. We’re excited about keeping the entire product going forward and being able to concentrate our investment in it, and making sure to support all of our customers in the products they’re using.”
Following the Nov. 29, 2016 merger, the combined company will operate and be managed under the Cvent umbrella. The combined company will have over 800 in technology/software development and more than 700 in client support. The combined entity has approximately 28,000 customers in 100 countries. The two companies have powered more than 2 million events and $50 billion in total RFP value sourced since inception, according to Cvent.
“What makes this merger such a hand-and-glove fit is that we both actually did focus on some of the same things and had a very similar culture,” Aggarwal said. “We both focused on a large segment of the market, the Global 5,000, and we also both worked a lot with the mid-market, from associations, nonprofits—not just corporate.…There were some things that we had and they didn’t, and they had and we didn’t, like [online and mobile booking engine] Passkey for room block management, or business transient, so from our perspective, our platform is going to get deeper now because now we have additional products that are integrated, and they’re talking together in one platform.
“We’re going to have the deepest, simplest and most integrated platform out there,” he continued.
Aggarwal said the two companies’ annual user events, Lanyon Live and Cvent CONNECT, will now be combined and operate under the Cvent CONNECT name, with the next installment set for June 12-16 in Las Vegas.
