In the past, many venues, including hotels, restaurants, weddings, and convention centers, managed their events using a combination of email, Excel, notebooks, and calendars. Over the past 20 years, software has been developed to help bring this process online. The first part of the process was to use internal servers for the shows where the software ran on a dedicated computer in the event manager’s or catering director’s office. If an update was needed, the software company literally had to send their team members to do it physically on site. While the software was much more efficient than the traditional system, it was still slow, clunky, and lacked strong features to streamline workflow. Now, the venue event data was in a central system where it could be protected against loss or misplacement, but it still required a lot of manual effort.

In the early 2000s, cloud-based computing began to take over and many of the traditional server-based software companies began offering cloud versions. This was a clever business model developed by Salesforce that charged venues per user, per month. It was great for the software company as they earned reliable recurring revenue, but it was also a win for the venues as they only had to pay for the software they actually used and not expensive hardware installation and maintenance. These programs were a huge step up from previous server-based programs that were installed on the site; however, they were often just slightly “custom” versions of software like Oracle or Salesforce, which were actually developed for sales teams and then turned into a product. that those companies could also sell to hotels, restaurants and venues. Despite its lack of customization, the software was widely adopted and is still used by many places today.

Now, we are entering a new phase in venue management software. Places want software that can talk to the outside world as new technologies are developed that are changing the way we do business. In addition, they are looking for software built specifically for their needs with a deep understanding of their specific workflow. A one-size-fits-all approach is no longer enough and is now being pushed back by the market leaders in the niche space. Places that are willing are adopting new software to do things like automate follow-ups, streamline BEO creation and delivery, and more. In the future, we will see software built specifically for venues replace existing ones that were simply bundled together for a quick sale, and instead see the rise of software designed with venues in mind every step of the way.