ACQUISITION AMBITION

from Meetings September October 2021

TURNING PURPOSE INTO PROFIT

While some industries have taken a serious knock, the virtual events platform business is booming. Meetings reveals the hotspots.

The past year has been very difficult for business to survive without some component that allows for online engagement with their clients and audiences. This has led to the rapid adoption of digital technologies and, in particular, virtual event platforms to support these solutions.

Based on a 187-page report titled Virtual Event Platform Market with COVID-19 Impact by Component by research consultancy Markets and Markets, the virtual event platform market is currently valued at US$10.4 billion (R157 billion). It is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 12.7% between now and 2026, when it will be valued at around $18.9 billion (R286 billion).

“The major development and differentiating factor in virtual event platforms are the capability to engage thousands of attendees at once, the ability to simulate real-life venues and infrastructures, and ever-evolving attendee engagement solutions. Developing countries across APAC (Asia Pacific) and MEA (the Middle East and Africa) are expected to offer more opportunities for vendors in the market,” Markets and Markets says in its summary of the report.

OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND Several mergers and acquisitions within the virtual event platform space over the past year are indicative of how rapidly this market is growing.

In mid-May, Cisco announced that it would acquire Socio Labs Inc – a four-year-old event management solutions company. The acquisition will result in the creation of a potent hybrid eventing solution.

“We are excited to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire Socio Labs, a US-based, modern event technology platform designed to power the hybrid events of the future. With Socio’s end-to-end event management platform, Cisco will provide event organisers with everything they need to successfully host an in-person, virtual or hybrid event,” said Javed Khan, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration, in an official company statement.

With the addition of Socio to its portfolio, Cisco is looking forward to empowering event organisers to provide ‘inclusive’ and engaging experiences for both in-person as well as virtual attendees across each event, regardless of size and format.

“Socio enables easy-to-use, highly customisable branded registration and ticketing capabilities, compelling and integrated web, mobile and event hall experiences, and delivers real-time analytics and actionable insights about event attendees, sponsors, exhibitors and more. With Socio technology, event organisers are able to foster continuous engagement with attendees by building and maintaining profiles and preferences, and serving attendees a personalised journey across the life cycle of all their events,” Javed noted in the statement.

Socio has been ahead of the curve on engagement trends and built a virtual eventing suite to provide a solution for seamless hybrid events at the very beginning of the pandemic.

“Socio shares Cisco’s sentiment that the future of events, like the future of work, will be hybrid and with that comes increased complexity for event managers to create inclusive, meaningful and measurable interactions for both virtual and in-person attendees. Socio offers powerful Webex technology to provide customers with an unparalleled hybrid event management solution to engage participants whether

they join in person or virtually,” said Yarkin Sakucoglu, co-founder of Socio, following the announcement by Cisco.

NO STOPPING THERE At the beginning of July, it was announced that the virtual events platform company Hopin had snapped up Attendify to grow its event marketing offering. Hopin celebrated its second birthday in June and the acquisition of Attendify marks its fifth acquisition during this past year.

“Our ambition is to build a unified product suite that delivers everything event professionals need to plan, produce and promote events – from beginning to end. An essential part of bringing to life an inspiring event is the ability to find your audience, to attract and build a community of kindred spirits. To that end, Hopin is proud to announce our acquisition of Attendify, which will advance our event marketing product offering,” said Hopin in the announcement on its website.

Hopin already owns StreamYard, Streamable, Jamm and mobile app Topi. Its latest acquisition of Attendify is expected to advance Hopin Events, the company’s event management platform, which comprises four pillars:

1Virtual Venue: an online environment, where organisers can deliver event programmes that attendees can participate in, in real time.

2Studio: a live video production studio by StreamYard, which enables the broadcast of professional, brandable video content.

3Event Marketing: tools designed for the promotion of events and engagement with communities.

4Onsite: technology and services for the management of in-person events. Through the acquisition of Attendify, Hopin aims to refine its event marketing offering and provide more value for its clients by reaching a broader audience and delivering critical engagement insights.

“If events are moments in time, communities are everything in-between. We are already partnering with Michael Balyasny and the excellent Attendify team in order to build the next generation of event marketing tools,” commented Johnny Boufarhat, CEO of Hopin.

Hopin also has plans in the pipeline to enable greater audience attendance and engagement with the delivery of new capacities that will include tools such as Audience CRM and Campaign Manager.

Audience CRM will provide a “comprehensive attendee data platform that will give event organisers a 360-degree view of engagement within an event (e.g. data on which attendees visited a sponsor booth, voted in a poll, or participated in a session).” It will achieve this by giving event hosts insights into understanding their audiences to produce tailored events, marketing campaigns, and products and services that are of value to them. Meanwhile, Campaign Manager will give event organisers access to Hopin’s tools to better drive event registrations as well as communicate with attendees and audiences.

NOT WITHOUT ITS OWN CHALLENGES Opportunities within the virtual events platform market may be flourishing; however, there remain some obstacles that are impeding its growth. These include issues around data privacy and security, as well as a lack of skills and expertise in integrating new virtual event software.

“Organisations maintain a different system for mailing and video conferencing, which increases chances of error and increases manual workload. Thus, integrating virtual event software can impact the growth of the virtual event platform market,” says Markets and Markets.