There's a certain amount of influence that comes with sheer
size, and if anyone has a lock on the meetings market at the moment, it's
Cvent. So when the meetings management and events technology provider announced
it would, in October, begin transitioning all clients to its Flex website
building technology, a lot of companies prepped for the change. While clients
can store and use their legacy templates through April 2019 or so, those
designs will retire after that grace period, and the company expects all
clients to migrate to the upgraded what-you-see-is-what-you-get Flex system in
the next year.
Flex was the single biggest technology investment to date
for Cvent, but Aggarwal also has been busy acquiring longer-tail solutions that
both modernize and expand the technology stack. Among Cvent's trophies this
year are Kapow, a distribution and instant booking platform for offsite venues
and teambuilding experiences. It also snapped up Social Tables, an event
diagramming, seating and collaboration technology that renders 3-D meeting
space visuals.
Aggarwal noted that the biggest change for the company in
2018 was its rapid growth. "We are growing faster now than [the company]
ever has over the last 19 years," he told the audience at Cvent Connect in
July. The company signed more than 2,500 new customers in the first half of the
year and in July was on track to hire the 1,000 employees it estimated hiring
for the year. Cvent also has made strides in penetrating the global market
place. The company opened offices in Australia and Singapore last year and
installed brick-and-mortar presences in Dubai and Germany in 2018.
While much of that growth has been driven by Cvent's
meetings management and event technology and services, the company additionally
has been tending to its alter ego since its merger with Lanyon in 2016; Cvent
Business Transient claims 80 percent of the Fortune 100 as clients. A
prediction: Cvent will double down on this side of the business in 2019.