Building and Evolving an Enterprise Event Platform

Toobler has spent years engineering production event technology for Informa Connect — registration through to onsite operations, sponsor and exhibitor workflows, mobile, reporting and the integrations that connect it all. This case study sets out what was built, why enterprise event platforms are hard to get right, and what that depth of engineering means for organisers and event-tech vendors today.

Customer and context

The client is Informa Connect, part of Informa plc and a major global events and B2B information group. Across a multi-year engagement, Toobler’s engineering team worked as an embedded partner on the technology powering a large portfolio of Informa Connect’s events and brands — the kind of relationship that only forms when a vendor understands event operations well enough to be trusted with the systems that run live, revenue-critical event days.

This was not a single build-and-leave project. It was sustained event platform development: features shipped, modules extended and architecture evolved as the client’s portfolio, brands and event formats grew.

The challenge

Running many events across multiple brands creates a specific kind of engineering pressure that generic software development doesn’t prepare you for. The organiser needed:

• A platform that could support digital, onsite and hybrid events without forking the codebase per format.
• Attendee networking and meeting scheduling that worked reliably at event-day scale, not just in a demo.
• Sponsor visibility and exhibitor lead workflows robust enough to justify sponsorship revenue.
• Consistent configuration and branding across many events run by different teams, on different timelines, under one shared platform.
• Reporting that gave commercial teams usable answers after the event ended, not just raw logs.

This is the recurring problem behind most searches for event management software: organisers already have systems: registration, CRM, badge scanning, and an app. What they’re missing is engineering that connects those systems and keeps them working under real operational load.

The solution, by capability

Toobler’s engineering scope spanned the full event technology stack.

Event platform and configuration — a multi-event, multi-brand architecture allowing each event to carry its own branding, agenda structure and access rules while sharing a common core, rather than duplicating the platform per brand.

Attendee experience — registration and identity, attendee profiles, discovery and self-service journeys designed to hold up across events of very different sizes and formats.

Networking and meetings — attendee-to-attendee discovery and meeting scheduling, built to keep matching and booking responsive during live event traffic.

Content and sessions — agenda and session tooling, live polling and Q&A, and room-presence tracking so organisers could see engagement as sessions ran, not only afterwards.

Sponsors and exhibitors — booth interaction workflows and sponsor visibility features designed around exhibitor management software needs: making sponsorship value measurable and exhibitor leads captured cleanly rather than lost in spreadsheets.

Lead capture — badge scanning and booth-level interaction data structured for follow-up, syncing into the exhibitor and sponsor reporting layer.

Virtual and hybrid — session delivery and interaction features built to work whether an attendee was in the room or online, without treating hybrid as an afterthought.

Onsite operations — workflows engineered for the realities of a venue floor: intermittent connectivity, high concurrency, and staff who need the system to simply keep working.

Mobile — an event mobile app covering agenda navigation, venue wayfinding, session engagement and meetings, engineered for the reliability that a mobile app for events demands when thousands of attendees rely on it simultaneously.

Reporting — engagement, sponsor and exhibitor reporting drawing on the interaction data generated across registration, sessions, meetings and booths.

Integrations — connections to external event systems and CRM landscapes so attendee, sponsor and exhibitor data could move between the platform and the organiser’s wider commercial stack.

Architecture: the conceptual flow

At a high level, the platform followed a consistent data flow: event configuration set up the brand, agenda and access rules; registration and identity brought attendees, sponsors and exhibitors into the system; the core platform served that experience through web and mobile; sessions, networking, meetings, sponsor and exhibitor modules generated interaction data as the event ran; and that interaction data fed into reporting and integration layers for use after the event closed.

This flow — configure, register, run, capture, report — is what makes an event platform genuinely enterprise-grade rather than a collection of standalone tools bolted together.

Engineering challenges worth naming

A few problems recur in enterprise event platform engineering, and they shaped the delivery approach:

• Multi-event, multi-brand configuration — supporting many events and brands from a shared core without configuration sprawl or one-off code paths.
• Event-day scale — registration, session and meeting workflows all need to remain responsive under concentrated, short-duration load rather than steady traffic.
• Mobile reliability — an event mobile app has to perform on unfamiliar venue networks, with attendees who won’t tolerate failure mid-session.
• Onsite and offline operation — badge scanning and onsite workflows engineered to continue functioning without connectivity and sync cleanly once it returns.
• Real-time communication — polling, Q&A and room-presence features depend on low-latency delivery at volume.
• Virtual and hybrid delivery — supporting in-room and remote attendees from the same session infrastructure, rather than two separate systems pretending to be one.

Results

Specific scale, lead-volume and reliability figures for this engagement are being prepared for publication with Informa Connect’s approval, and are deliberately not estimated in the meantime.

What can be stated plainly is the scope: a production event platform, engineered and evolved over years, covering registration, attendee experience, networking, sponsors, exhibitors, mobile, onsite operations, reporting and integrations for Informa Connect, running many brands across its portfolio.

What this experience means today

This engagement is why Toobler can speak credibly to event software engineering problems that most technology partners have only read about, not built. Understanding event data — what a badge scan means, why sponsor visibility metrics have to reconcile with exhibitor lead counts, how meeting-scheduling load spikes on day one of a conference — comes from having engineered the systems that generate that data in the first place.

That domain depth now feeds directly into Toobler’s current work with event-technology vendors and enterprise organisers: connecting fragmented registration, CRM, sponsor and exhibitor systems; modernising ageing event platform architecture; and building the AI-assisted reporting and commercial-intelligence features that today’s event businesses are being asked to deliver — all under a governance model that keeps a human in the loop on anything consequential, rather than a bolted-on AI feature.

If you’re an event-tech vendor or an enterprise organiser weighing what to build, modernise or connect next, discuss your event technology roadmap with Toobler’s engineering team.