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Stova, a multifunctional event technology platform with a lengthy history in the sector, revealed the next phase of its evolution, including a new approach to venue sourcing. The company announced a native integration with sourcing-platform Meetingselect, and as a result will sunset its own sourcing and RFP tool, which had been in use for a decade.
Stova's sourcing platform was built on Zentila, the result of a 2016 acquisition (when Stova was still known as etouches). That came at a time when so-called all-in-one event-tech platforms viewed sourcing as a key point of entry for planners using their technology — in part due to the success of Cvent Marketplace.
But the strategy around sourcing has changed, noted Stova CEO Anupam Palit. "There are certain pieces of the portfolio products that make sense, that are kind of core to us," he explained. "The bread-and-butter-type stuff, the registration, the mobile app, the data analytics — that's stuff that we think we need to create in house. To be frank, Zentila over the years got a little bit clunky, fell behind some of its peers; we didn't put the same investment into it as we did our core products.
"So we had to ask, do we go back and rebuild Zentila from scratch, or is there a way for us to do a partnership that makes sense?" Palit continued. "We've known Meetingselect for a long time, and they were of the same mind as us, in terms of building a complete integration instead of a pure API. Now when you log in to Stova and hit the venue-sourcing button, it takes you through single sign-on into Meetingselect. It's a complete integration and takes advantage of their incredible capabilities."
Stova's Zentila tool will be sunset over the next several months, Palit said. He praised Meetingselect's global venue coverage, as well as the seamless nature of the sourcing, booking and payment functionality built into the platform as key reasons Stova elected to partner with them.
New enhancements, new priorities
In addition to the venue-sourcing partnership, Stova announced enhancements to what it views as its core products. That includes:
- New registration templates: Designed to drastically reduce implementation time, the new templates are fully configurable and require no HTML nor CSS programming.
- Enhanced communication tools: A new built-in editor for both event emails and attendee marketing allows for more advanced targeting by session, hotel, travel and more.
- Stova BI: New business-intelligence tools allow for more ways to slice, filter and generally interact with all event data.
Broader range of data analytics
The last point — new functionality related to data analytics — is a particularly important aspect of Stova's evolution, and it involves catering to clients with different levels of data-analysis expertise. "The BI is more of an enterprise-level solution for folks who are comfortable dealing with large data and who have a little bit more experience with business intelligence in general," Palit explained.
Stova will continue to offer more streamlined data as well, he added. “If you have a team that's not as comfortable with big data solutions, the Event Intelligence platform will make more sense, as it includes a lot of prepackaged dashboards. That's a very versatile tool as well, and you can customize your dashboards.”
About a third of Stova's clients have the capabilities to use BI today, Palit estimated.
"The next natural play for us is to think about what efficiency tools and layers we can build on top of this, and to make the more robust tools applicable and relevant to the full client base," Palit said.
The answer to that? Simplified client-facing tools and natural-language input. "So instead of trying to work this big dataset through a BI tool, you can just use natural language to accomplish the same tasks," he added. That's a critical piece of Stova's roadmap in 2027.
It's likewise a critical point to consider for any multifunctional event tech platform that's essentially competing with Claude and ChatGPT when it comes to event data analytics.