July - 2014 issue

i2space Web Technologies: A Go-Between for the Travel and Hospitality Agencies

By Poulomi Mukherjee

'An idea can transform the world and rewrite all rules'. Bhargava Vangapally's world also transformed after a fate call on Skype with one of his childhood buddy after long in 2009 while he was working on-site in London for one of the top tier-1 Indian IT MNC. Listening to his friend's woes about extremely high budgetary requirement for a custom software development, Bhargava apprehended that a vast B2B opportunity is awaiting in automating bookings in Indian Travel & Hospitality sector. He summoned a team of deft professionals and set out to build a custom solution that is not only multi-tenant so as to be pocket-friendly but also scalable allows custom configuration. Thus, i2space was incepted in Hyderabad by Bhargava. The solution devised was an integration of various partner's APIs for booking bus, flights, hotels and was gradually enhanced with a few more services in demand like cabs and holiday bookings.

Soon, i2space realized that a client specific codebase and database model that chases bugs for every solution is not feasible in the long run. Thus, a customizable travel portal named eTravos with multiple services on the cloud SaaS platform was formulated using cutting-edge Microsoft technologies by a highly dedicated & motivated team of 20 professionals with relevant technology and domain expertise. eTravos is a first-of-its-kind one stop standard and robust product that can be a real plug-and-play solution across all travel related services like bus, flight (LLC & GDS), hotel (domestic and international), cabs and package bookings which addresses both B2B and B2C segments. "With eTravos you can launch your own travel portal, with 7+ services, with the custom look and feel you want; i.e. launch your own travel brand within 15 minutes!", says Bhargava Vangapally, Founder & Director, i2space Web Technologies.

Travel and tourism in India is a high-taxed industry while major concerns relating to the security in online transactions still persist. The solutions provided by other companies, which apart from being expensive, mostly lead to failure due to requirement miscommunication, lack of understanding of the domain or time/cost over-run. i2space provides secure, transparent and user-friendly solution which even supports real-time booking/cancellation notification via email, SMS, balance tracking in addition to secure and flexible payment options using payment gateways. The eccentricity of the products of i2space has led it to serve more than 142 travel clients along with 2700 agents that are doing the good amount business turnover on a daily basis. "eTravos is a product that can be shared with thousands of customers &, yet, every one of them will feel as if they are using their own custom portal," adds Bhargava.

The company envisions enhancing eTravos – their flagship product – with a few more services in Hospitality segment with their own inventory where the same booking engine (and Web API) that has been used for eTravos will be used. i2space contemplates to devise a booking engine for amusement/theme parks, banquet halls, hotel & resort chain whilst going for some advanced Analytics using Big Data solutions for the benefit of their clients. Further, i2Space has every intention to move to the Cloud IaaS.