From Six Months Old to the Olympic Games
Centium Software | EventsAIR | Consensus Award Winner 2014
If you've attended, worked at or watched one of the world's major international events, there's a chance Australian technology was helping make it happen behind the scenes.
The Olympic Games. G20. APEC. CHOGM. ASEAN. The Commonwealth Games. World Rugby. The Pan Am Games.
Behind events of that scale sit extraordinary logistical challenges — registrations, accommodation, transport, communications, delegates, security, schedules and thousands upon thousands of moving parts.
And behind some of them has been software built in Australia.
EventsAIR.
Consensus Saw It Six Months In
When Centium Software won a Consensus Award for EventsAIR in 2014, the product was remarkably young.
EventsAIR had been conceived only the year before. Founder and CEO Trevor Gardiner, who had been developing technology for the international meetings and events industry since 1987, had decided to completely reimagine what modern event-management software could look like.
After an intensive development program, EventsAIR launched in 2014.
Within its first six months, it had already attracted dozens of customers.
The Consensus judges saw something much bigger.
They described EventsAIR as an innovative, world-leading event management system being rapidly accepted internationally. Centium wasn't thinking small either: in what was then estimated as a US$5.65 billion market, it was targeting becoming the world's number-two supplier.
The judges called Centium:
“the very essence of Australian software entrepreneurship.”
It was particularly notable because this wasn't the company's first Consensus success. Centium had previously received Consensus recognition for its GuestPoint accommodation management software before returning with an entirely new platform.
Then EventsAIR Went Global
What happened afterwards makes the 2014 recognition considerably more interesting in hindsight.
EventsAIR expanded into more than 50 countries, used by multinational companies, governments, universities and professional event organisers around the world.
But it's the names of the events that tell the real story.
EventsAIR technology has been used in global gatherings including G20, APEC, CHOGM and ASEAN, alongside sporting events including the Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, World Rugby and Pan Am Games.
Gardiner himself had become a specialist in technology for major world events. His work included systems supporting the 2012 London Olympics, 2014 G20, 2018 Commonwealth Games, ASEAN Australia Special Summit and APEC.
In 2021, that pedigree led to another major appointment.
EventsAIR was selected as the Official Accommodation and Transfer Systems Provider for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, responsible for technology supporting critical accommodation and transport operations surrounding the Games.
The Australian software company that Consensus recognised when its new platform was barely six months old had become trusted infrastructure behind events attracting the world's governments, athletes, businesses and media.
Then the World Stopped Holding Events
EventsAIR's story also contains a chapter nobody could have predicted in 2014.
In 2020, COVID-19 effectively shut down the global events industry. For a company whose technology existed to help people gather, it could have been catastrophic. Instead, EventsAIR built OnAIR, its virtual and hybrid event platform.
By 2021, EventsAIR announced that OnAIR had surpassed one million virtual attendees. The company had survived one of the most profound disruptions its industry had ever experienced by changing with it. And when physical events returned, EventsAIR was still there.
The Technology You Never See
That's perhaps what makes this one of the more fascinating stories in the Consensus alumni archive. Millions of people can interact with technology without ever knowing the name of the company that built it.
The delegate arriving at an international summit doesn't necessarily know what powers the registration system. The athlete doesn't know what sits behind accommodation logistics. The attendee opening an event app isn't thinking about the Australian developers who built the platform underneath it. They don't need to. The technology just has to work.
In December 2014, Consensus recognised a newly launched Australian platform with enormous international ambitions. What followed included the Olympics, G20, APEC, CHOGM and the Commonwealth Games. Not bad for software that was only six months old when the judges first saw it.