On the morning of May 22, Cvent, the biggest provider of applications for venue sourcing, event marketing, logistics management, on-site services, mobile-event apps, and post-event measurement, announced that it was furloughing more than 400 employees, equivalent to 10 percent of its workforce.
The company released a statement saying that “we have had to follow others in taking the expense reduction of last resort, reducing our headcount…These Cventers were valued members of our team who made great contributions to the business, and we will miss them. They are more than just our colleagues, and our hearts go out to them and their families.”
Started in 1999 by CEO Reggie Aggarwal, the firm celebrated its 20th year in 2019 with an announcement that it had hired nearly 700 people to help support 300,000 product users across 30,000 client organizations. Also in 2019, The Software Report ranked Aggarwal number one on its list of the top 50 CEOs running SaaS (software as a service) companies. That same report noted that “90 percent of the original team is still working by his side.”
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Cvent has pivoted to focus more on virtual event coordination and execution, including working with IMEXGroup on its PlanetIMEX virtual experience. The firm recently announced that its 5,000-attendee annual user conference, Cvent CONNECT, would not take place in Las Vegas in June but instead be a virtual event in late August.
