The technology landscape in the event industry is fragmented. There are lots of platforms that do lots of different things. The problem is that many don't share data and functionality, i.e. they don't work well together. Integration would be immensely helpful to change the situation, but there is still pushback and a layer of complexity that many event professionals aren't equipped to address. Read about what's going on and what needs to happen to change the situation.

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What Integration Looks Like
Pat Pathade, CEO of Fantail Consulting & Technologies, a
solutions development and integration firm specializing in
b-to-b events, describes integration as “the process of get-
ting two or more technology applications to work together
holistically. When something happens in one application, it
reflects in the others and vice versa. When you have multiple
applications exchanging data and generating new data auto-
matically, you create an ecosystem that has value greater
than the sum of its parts.”
Integration is at the center of smart events. When an
attendee registers for a meeting and her profile and session
selections also appear in the event mobile app, integration
made it happen. As she walks across the exhibit floor and
receives messages from exhibitors whose Bluetooth readers
have detected her wearable beacon and associated it with
her registration details, integration is responsible. When
she returns to her hotel room that evening and accesses an
online summary of all her activities during the day, thank the
connected ecosystem for that too.
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I
n the future, data will automatically flow from one event application to
another. It will always be up-to-date and easily accessible no matter what
combination of technology vendors is in the stack. Event organizers and
planners will be able to craft frictionless customer experiences and build
datadynastiesthatwillkeepthemleanandcompetitive.Alothastohappen
before those dreams come true. Organizers will have to invest in integration and
technology companies will have to build applications with connection in mind.
It’s not going to be easy.
BYMICHELLEBRUNO
WhyCan’tAllofOurDataSilos
JustGetAlong?
Event organizers have a lot to gain from integration. For
starters, it eliminates the need to download a list of regis-
trants from the registration application, upload it to the
mobile application, download the enhanced attendee data
from the mobile app and upload it to the marketing auto-
mation platform every time there is a change in a record. It
provides organizers with a view of the customer—what he
likes, sees, wants, does—from every technology touch point
and delivers data to help them develop personalized expe-
riences, discover hidden audience segments, market with
precision and realize new revenue streams.
From Smorgasbord to à la Carte
It’s not that integrated systems don’t already exist. They do.
There are a handful of robust, multi-feature technology plat-
forms that perform a variety of tasks from website creation
to online booth sales to registration—and everything works
well together out of the box. But no existing system can ever
do it all. There is an explosion of best-of-breed applications
that solve niche problems, and organizers want those too. In

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fact, organizers want the full-featured plat-
forms and the one-off applications to work
together and for the best of breeds to work
with each other.
The Association of Equipment Manu-
facturers (AEM), organizers of several trade
shows, made a decision to integrate their
existing event technologies. They hired an
event technology manager to oversee the
solutions, data strategy and integrations
across their show portfolio. A year-and-a-
half ago, Bobby Hoffman was tasked with
bringing AEM’s existing vendor group to
the table and doing the hard work of deter-
mining standards, mapping data fields and
moving the process continuously forward.
During Hoffman’s tenure, AEM has
transformed the exhibitor experience.
Companies can now use a single exhibitor
dashboard to access multiple services from
multiple vendors—housing, lead retrieval,
marketing services, attendee list rental,
sponsorship purchases and registration—
with one login. The organization has imple-
mented a two-way integration between the
online exhibitor directory and mobile app
and is headed toward bi-directional inte-
grations between the exhibitor directory,
mobile app and registration.
Hoffman began his organization’s trek
down the integration road with a face-to-
face meeting of the group’s technology
companies. “The purpose of the tech sum-
mit was to bring people together, build
relationships and get them to understand
that they are all on the AEM team, and they
have to act like team members,” he says.
Each vendor brought its account manager,
technology lead and project manager. The
discussion wasn’t always smooth sailing.
“Sometimes, it was a little bit of a battle, but
a good battle, the same thing you would
want from an internal team,”he adds.
Organizer Apprehension
Therearelotsofreasonswhysomeorganizers
might shy away from integration. The invest-
ment required is potentially massive. “We’re
talking about getting the management team
onboard to buy into it, getting the board to
finance it and getting attendees to opt into
allowing organizers to use their data,”says Joe
Colangelo, CEO and co-founder of Bear Ana-
lytics, a data analytics firm for event produc-
ers, associations and professional societies.“It
requires a lot of folks to change how they’re
going to do their day jobs.”
The return on investment of large-scale
integration isn’t always clear or big enough
for some event planers. Despite the across-
the-board value that an integrated appli-
cation ecosystem can bring to an orga-
nization, much of the data gleaned from
technology today is only being plowed
back into marketing initiatives, Colangelo
explains. So, the data insights and gains
in net new attendees and exhibitors that
could come from integration have to be
absolute game changers in order for the
potentially large investment to pay off.
Even if senior management is open to
the possibility of integrating all of the event
technology the organization currently uti-
lizes, there simply aren’t many case stud-
ies to use as reference points. “The CEO is
going to find out that the list of comparable
events that have accomplished a big inte-
gration is either extremely small or non-ex-
istent,” Colangelo says. “He is going to have
to think about whether he wants his orga-
nization to be first or wait for some other
group with deeper pockets to do it.”
Vendor Resistance
From the vendor’s perspective, there are
costs associated with integration. Some of
the newer application developers are busy
perfecting their features and don’t have
funding to also work on standardizing their
data exchange capabilities. Established ven-
dors with open application programming
interfaces (APIs) are reluctant to work with
best-of-breed newcomers over fears about
data security. “We’re dealing with really
important data, sometimes addresses and
phone numbers,” explains Terence Donnelly,
CMP, vice president of sales for Experient.
“We’re not going to integrate with companies
that aren’t following accepted standards.”
Some legacy technology vendors are
bearish on integration for other reasons.
“Making it easy for other technology pro-
viders to access your app is a business deci-
sion,” says Fantail’s Pathade. “By allowing
other companies to build new capabilities
on top of your existing software, you’re
potentially shut out of any opportunities to
develop those capabilities yourself.” Drop-
ping everything to integrate with a com-
pany that might not even be in business
the next day is another reason why some
solution providers aren’t flinging open their
data doors.
Not all members of a proposed eco-
system are aligned with a single service
category. For example, some mobile app
providers also offer lead retrieval services.
So, when a planner requires the registra-
tion system to integrate with a mobile app
vendor—the former knowing full well that
the latter is a would-be competitor—it
doesn’t sit well with the registration vendor.
In these instances, registration companies
are not only resistant to integration, but are
contractually bound to thwart it when pric-
ing structures are potentially compromised.
The State of Integration
Two issues have to be addressed before
applications can be integrated: connec-
tions and data storage. Connection is messy
in the event industry, according to Pathade.
Many application providers still don’t have
standard, well-documented and published
APIs—the set of rules and instructions an
application developer establishes to allow
other software developers to access its
data. Without standard or open APIs, orga-
nizers have to initiate discussions with the
vendors about how to connect.
The discourse around data integration
focuses on three main approaches to data
storage. In the first scenario, one existing
application in the ecosystem, an association
management system (AMS) or a customer
relationship management system (CRM), is
designated as the “master” application and
tasked with storing the most updated and
enriched versions of data produced by all
the other apps. While it’s a more available
When you have multiple applications
exchanging data and generating new data
automatically, you create an ecosystem that
has value greater than the sum of its parts.
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4. approach, it’s also potentially more costly
because it usually requires customization.
A second approach gaining momen-
tum involves the creation of an indepen-
dent database separate from any of the
other applications in the ecosystem. Some,
not all, of the data from each application
is automatically pulled into a smaller, pur-
pose-built data warehouse. The indepen-
dent application is easier to manage and
maintain than a master application, which
was originally conceived for a different
purpose.“Keeping it simple by storing your
most critical data from a variety of sources
in the same language and in the same loca-
tion lowers the barriers to data access and
heightens usability,”Colangelo says.
Athirdapproachisdistributeddatastor-
age. In this scenario, when data changes in
one app it’s updated in all of the apps to
which it’s connected. Mechanisms are put
in place to ensure the security and integrity
of the data, and when an organizer wants
to change an application in the ecosystem,
he migrates data from the previous vendor
over to the new vendor. In a distributed
system, the organizer and every ecosystem
member can benefit collectively from the
data enhancements made by others.
The HardWork Ahead
Pathade says that it’s more about the will of
the industry than it is about available tools
and best practices for integration, which
are commonplace outside the industry.
“Even your smartphone is an example of an
integrated ecosystem—all of the individual
applications are connected,” he says. “If you
want to take a picture and email it or post it
to Facebook, you can do it easily. Facebook,
Google, Salesforce and others have open,
available and standard APIs. They even
publish step-by step instructions and demo
applications for use in connecting to them.
Unlike a decade ago, questions about
data standards or programming language
compatibilities no longer exist. Data stan-
dards have been defined and the computer
languages for reading, writing, storing and
reporting data are commonly available and
well documented. There are even tools
(middleware) for facilitating data exchange
between applications when vendors don’t
offer standard APIs or the languages used
across the ecosystem differ. “This is not the
wild west. We have the capabilities. It’s a
non-issue,”Pathade says.
It’s becoming clearer that event plan-
ners are in a unique position to drive inte-
gration. AEM’s Hoffman addresses integra-
tion in his RFPs and contracts.“In every RFP
you write, ask the vendor who they have
worked with, what kind of integrations
they have done and whether they have an
open API,” he says. “Write the expectations
and deliverables into the contract so that
it’s legal. In our contract, we require atten-
dance at a tech summit with other vendors
where we will go through the processes
we’re going to follow and map the [integra-
tion] out.”
Not all event technology companies
will be on board with integration. But the
alternative is equally untenable. As orga-
nizers hone their internal processes, dedi-
cate resources and achieve milestones one
by one, the pressure will be on for solutions
providers to capitulate lest they be left out
of consideration entirely. Hoffman con-
soles them with a little heart-to-heart talk.
He tells his technology vendors, “I’m going
to demand a lot from you because I want
to make you better. I want you to push me
because I want to be better. That’s what a
partnership is.” n
Michelle Bruno is a writer, blogger and
technology journalist. She publishes Event
TechBrief, a weekly newsletter and website
on event technology. You can reach her at
michelle@brunogroup.com or on Twitter
@michellebruno.
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Even your smartphone is an example of
an integrated ecosystem. If you want to take
a picture and email it or post it to Facebook,
you can do it easily.
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MPIWEB.ORG 69