At SAP, the problem was becoming a little embarrassing. The company’s Asia-Pacific and Japan team had become very good at putting on digital events: more than 300 in 2020. Some months brought as many as 8,000 attendees. Then registrations slipped. Attendance slipped. People spent less time engaging. The machinery worked. The audience was getting tired.
- ON24 turns webinars and content into audience data for marketing and sales.
- Its AI tools give recordings a longer working life.
- Cvent completed its acquisition in April 2026.
01 The cure was fewer webinars
SAP’s response was unusually sensible for a marketing department: make less noise. Run fewer events, shorten them, reduce ineffective invitations and let people watch on demand. Simplify registration so returning visitors could reach the content without repeatedly filling out forms.
“We’ve made a deliberate attempt to make the events better,” said Len Augustine, SAP’s regional marketing leader. That is a useful place to begin with ON24, the software behind those sessions. Its business depends on what an audience finds worth doing once the stream starts.
“We’ve made a deliberate attempt to make the events better.”
Len Augustine / SAP
02 The audience leaves fingerprints
A name on a registration list offers limited guidance to a salesperson. A question about implementation, followed by a technical download, offers a possible opening. ON24 captures those interactions: polls, questions, viewing time, resource clicks and calls to action. Its analytics organize the activity around people and accounts.
Webinars handles live, prerecorded and on-demand presentations. Content Hubs gives the recordings and related material a home. Personalized landing pages tailor what different groups see. Connections to Salesforce, Marketo and Eloqua move the resulting information into systems where teams already work.
Imagine two attendees at the same product session. One stays for a few minutes; another downloads a deployment guide and asks about migration. That is an illustrative example, but it captures the selling proposition: the follow-up can respond to a person’s interests instead of treating every attendee as an identical lead.
The distinction is one of emphasis. Alternatives include Zoom, GoTo Webinar, Webex and Livestorm; many offer overlapping tools. ON24 organizes its pitch around a continuing marketing program, with branded experiences, content reuse and engagement history. The video window is one component of a larger operation.
03 A long way from the news desk
ON24’s own history contains several changes of assignment. Incorporated as NewsDirect in January 1998, it adopted the ON24 name that December. In a 2026 retrospective, co-founder Sharat Sharan described the progression: multimedia press releases, an internet broadcast network for retail investors, webcasting and virtual events, then B2B marketing.
The lesson is more interesting than a tidy founding myth. Distribution technology can survive changes in what customers will pay to distribute. By February 2021, ON24 was selling a digital engagement platform and listing on the New York Stock Exchange. It had taken 23 years to get there.
04 Give the recording another job
The present product strategy extends that habit of reassignment. A webinar takes work to prepare. Leaving it as an hour-long replay gives that work a limited afterlife. ON24’s Analytics and Content Engine, or ACE, can generate transcripts, blogs, summaries and video clips from presentation material. Engagement heatmaps help identify moments that drew audience activity.
AI Propel+ packages production, content creation, translation and follow-up into a campaign workflow. The practical attraction is fewer handoffs between separate tools. The editorial responsibility remains with the customer: a generated summary still needs to say something useful, accurately.
Distribution matters, too. A LinkedIn integration announced in November 2025 lets teams publish ON24-hosted events to LinkedIn Events and synchronize registrations. It closes a mundane gap between the place an audience discovers a session and the system that runs it. Fewer disconnected forms make the campaign easier to administer.
There is an older, less automated version of the same idea. SAP Concur used webinar questions to develop material for sales and customer-service teams. Its training series reached more than 3,500 users across 3,000 accounts. ON24’s case study reports an average $600,000 in pipeline per webinar program. Pipeline describes potential business, not collected revenue.
05 A good webinar is still a business expense
ON24 sells cloud subscriptions and professional services, with custom pricing. In 2025, subscription and other platform revenue supplied about 92% of sales. Buyers include technology vendors, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers. The company reported 1,539 customers at year-end.
Its own economics add some friction to the cheerful customer stories. Revenue fell from $163.7 million in 2023 to $148.1 million in 2024 and $139.3 million in 2025. The 2025 net loss was $28.9 million. The annual report also described reduced demand for its legacy Virtual Conference product, which it was deemphasizing.
That suggests a buying test. A team running occasional announcements may get little value from an elaborate engagement program. The case becomes stronger when people produce relevant content repeatedly, keep usable customer records and have someone ready to follow up. Buying the software cannot supply that discipline.
Look inside a historical analytics dashboard +
A historical product demonstration, not ON24’s operating results. The sample figures illustrate the interface.
06 The $400 million next act
In December 2025, ON24 announced an agreement to be acquired by Cvent for approximately $400 million in cash. The deal closed on April 1, 2026. Cvent, backed by Blackstone-managed funds, said it would keep investing in ON24 and connect digital engagement with its broader event portfolio.
The board’s merger explanation weighed the certainty of cash against the risks of remaining independent. Cvent’s strategic argument is straightforward: a customer’s webinar, conference visit and subsequent content viewing belong to the same relationship. Connecting them could give a marketing team a fuller picture. That is the stated direction, not evidence that every integration is already finished.
The part worth copying is available before any purchase. Ask a useful question. Notice the answer. Make the recording easier to use. Give the next conversation some context. SAP’s crowded calendar exposed the problem early: producing another event is easy to count. Earning another hour of attention is harder.
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