As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, Sally White reports on the latest acquisitions and the race to offer new products

The bullish view of the global events industry’s 2016 voiced by American Express is being shared by those with money hence the acquisitions to date. So far these have included Eventbrite’s move on Queue, Vista Equity’s purchase of Cvent and Marketo and the Accel-KKR acquisition of a stake in Cendyn.

Now it is the turn of etouches, which is buying Zentila a hotel-sourcing platform based in Florida.etouches, a global cloud-based event management software company HQ-ed in Connecticut, says it wants  Zentila for “its award-winning platform (which) completely streamlines the complex process of sourcing and booking venues as well as capturing data to measurably increase meeting ROI.” In addition, Zentila handles requests for proposals for venues. 

etouches is not saying how much it is spending on Zentila, though it did close a $20 million round of growth funding a couple of weeks ago. The sum is unlikely, however, to challenge the $1.65 billion that Vista paid for Cvent and the $1.79 billion for Marketo. Yet, some impressive numbers are being forecast for growth in the event management software market (EMS). Markets & Markets published a report at the end of last year predicting a rise from $5.44 billion last year to $9.28 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 11.3%.”

The market is well populated, hence the race to offer new products. Major players listed by Markets & Markets in the EMS market space included Cvent, Xing Events, Certain Inc, Ungerboeck, etouches, Eventbrite’s, DEA, Active Networks, Lanyon, and Zerista. Companies such as RegPoint Solutions, SocialTables, and Eventzilla have also emerged as key innovators.

The increasing number of smartphone users, rising budgetary expenditure on events and rapid adoption of the cloud platform are the main drivers driving the growth of the EMS market

The increasing number of smartphone users, rising budgetary expenditure on events and rapid adoption of the cloud platform are the main drivers driving the growth of the EMS market. “With the increase in the demand of meetings, inductions, conferences, exhibitions (MICE), event organisers are trying to implement best-in-class technology that can handle the entire event lifecycle from start to end.”

At the same time, services, says the report, “are expected to grow at a higher CAGR as compared to software segment. Managed services are expected to have the highest growth rate while professional services account for the highest market share in 2015. Analytics software is one of the fastest-growing software in the EMS market.”

Unsurprisingly, North America is by far the largest market, but, says Markets & Markets, APAC is the one likely to show the most rapid growth. In size, after North America, come Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America. The North American region is expected to continue being the largest revenue generator region for EMS vendors for the next five years, followed by Europe.

eTouches’ female touch

Etouches’s growth, too, has been impressive since its launch in 1998. It lists 9,000 users spanning 35 different countries, naming such clients as Dell, Volkswagen, and the Financial Times.Unusually in the male-dominated software industry, its founding entrepreneur was a woman - Leonora Valvo, a former travel consulting specialist.

She started it as Global Executive Business Services, a fee-for-service event management company, and it stayed as such until 2008 when the business was relaunched as etouches.In the same year it launched its first events management technology solution. A couple of years later it won $2.5 million in the first round of venture capital investments with lead investor Greycroft Partners. The remainder was sourced from Cava Capital and Connecticut Innovations.

Two years later it secured a further $7.75 million, this time from Level Equity, and launched its mobile application, eMobile, to allow users to create and run meeting and event scheduling on their phones. In September 2013, it went to the IT industry to find a president and CEO - Oni Chukwu, who came from Triple Point Technology, an in-cloud commodity management software company.

etouches’s progress has come with  a continuing steady stream of funding - $6 million in 2013, which helped it bring its event total to 100,000 and registrations to 10 million. The following year, it launched its applications on the Sales Force App Exchange and strengthened its integration with the CRM software. By 2015 it had expanded into the Middle East, with an HQ in Dubai.

Later that year, etouches acquired TapCrowd, a mobile application company for marketing data for events for businesses and associations. It also attracted $14 million of funding and bought Inevention, a venue sourcing platform which estimates event costs.  Now, etouches says, it offers 16 different modules for event management and has 1,200 clients in 80 countries.

Valvo moved on several years ago, and while describing herself as “a life-long event industry entrepreneur”, keeps a low profile. That is not so say she is not busy - as her LinkedIn page shows. She has stayed in the industry, helping launch three more companies in travel and conferencemanagement. She is listed as a founder at insightXM, which provides data analytics and insights product for Live Events.

But she is also on the board of a few others, including Swoogo, set up with etouches’s software team, which offers event management software designed to be “fun to use”.  Sounds as though that is her defining criteria! Her interests? ‘Disruptive ideas’, of course!

Join us at TDS North America in Las Vegas (Oct 6-7) where Walker Fletcher, Managing Director Americas, FC Milan and Christopher Lee, Managing Director Partnerships, San Diego Chargers will be speaking more about the fast-growing events space