Vista completes purchase of Cvent, merges it with Lanyon

The combined company will be called Cvent and will be run by Reggie Aggarwal

Back in April, private equity firm Vista Equity Partners announced the acquisition of enterprise event management platform Cvent. The price of the deal was $36.00 per share in a transaction valued at approximately $1.65 billion.

On Tuesday it revealed that it closed the deal, and it disclosed the fate of its new acquisition: Cvent has been merged with Lanyon, a cloud-based software for the meetings and events industry, which was acquired by Vista in 2013. 

Going forward, the combined company will operate under the Cvent brand and will be led by Reggie Aggarwal, Cvent’s founder and CEO. David Bonnette, CEO of Lanyon, will work with the management team helpin to transition the two entities into a single company, and it doesn't sound as though he will be staying on after that.

Together, the company will have more than 800 technology professionals and more than 700 customer-facing support staff, along with 28,000 customers in 100 countries. Combined, they have powered over 2 million events and sourced over $50 billion total RFP value through their sourcing networks,

The headquarters for the combined company will be in Tysons Corner, Virginia with a significant office presence in Lanyon’s former headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The merger is effective as of Tuesday, and the two companies will combine business operations over the coming year.

Cvent’s common stock stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange on November 29.

Founded in 1999, Cvent offers software solutions to event planners for online event registration, venue selection, event management, mobile apps for events, e-mail marketing and web surveys. 

It has over 16,000 customers and 2,000 employees worldwide.

“We celebrate two new milestones today as we formally join the Vista family and merge with our highly-regarded peer, Lanyon,” Aggarwal said in a statement. “Combined under the Cvent umbrella, and with Vista’s powerful backing, we will draw on our decades of experience to push the boundaries of event technology innovation and remain focused on delivering outstanding technology, capabilities and service to the events industry.”

The company went public in 2013 at an IPO price of $21 a share. 

Vista has made eight other acquisitions this year. In January it bought Telarix, a provider of wholesale and partner solutions for communication service providers; in May it acquired Vertafore, an insurance technology company, along with Bain Capital; in May, it bought marketing automation software company Marketo for $1.79 billion; it bought Ping Identity, an enterprise security company; on August it bought Granicus, a provider of software solutions to improve government efficiency and transparency; in September it bought Regulatory DataCorp, a provider of intelligence, risk and compliance protection, it purchased Infoblox, a network control company and it acquired GovDelivery, a cloud-based digital communication platform.

(Image source: glassdoor.com)