The year 2010 was crucial for the Indian e-commerce sector, during which India entered into an age of evolution and everything else in this sector became clearly visible that year. Though a fairly old industry in India, e-commerce sector caught the fancy of investors and generated multiple entrepreneurial avenues. One sector that demanded the eyes of investors was the flourishing online ticket booking space. The demand for custom travel portals was already going through the roof.
And that’s when i2space Web Technologies marked its presence – an ISO 9001:2008 Certified leading software solution provider specializing in Travel & Hospitality Domain Solutions, emerged from the vision of a self trained learn-while-go entrepreneur, Bhargava Vangapally, Founder and Managing Director, who spotted an immense opportunity in domestic and international travel market.
Since its inception, i2space has successfully executed more than 300+ cloud-based Travel and Hospitality portals by consuming their partners’ API. Headquartered in Hyderabad, i2space has serviced domestic market executions as well as a few global executions in North America, Australia, Europe and Africa. Based on the domain and technology experience gained during last seven years, they have evolved a product named eTravos – a multi-tenant cloud-based SaaS platform that empowers their clients to start a travel and hospitality portal with their custom design within 15 minutes. With more than 300+ cloud sites already been executed, the platform currently empowers across 15 countries, across 50+ suppliers, 900 airlines, 340,000 hotels, 30+ payment gateways globally.
Journey from Travel to Hospitality
The i2space’s journey was started by developing independent travel portals, but that did not constrain i2space to be just another “travel IT services” company. Instead, i2space evolved itself to be a product based company with the major chunk of revenue streaming from a B2B2C product named eTravos.com. At the core eTravos is built on Microsoft technologies.
The i2space team was searching pan India Bus inventory of leading bus aggregators and that’s when they realized that on one hand Southern & Western India operators have been extensively covered, whereas on the other, a plethora of operators from Eastern and Northern India are still offline. And thus, i2space decided to fill this void and launched OBIBO.in. OBIBO (Online Bus Inventory & Booking Operations) provides Bus Inventory management as well as Booking service and brings the following in a single platform- Bus Operators, Bus Aggregators, Travel Agents and Website Development Companies.
The journey that was started from travel portals, entered into hospitality as well. i2Space’s hospitality inventory & bookings management product, Hozbe.com aims to connect the Hotel aggregators that have not reached out to smaller towns or even 2 star hotels in metros. “With Hozbe we’re aiming to link not only big & renowned hotel groups, but also the smaller hospitality players in small towns in India like home-stays, furnished apartments”, adds Bhargava.
An Entrepreneur who Loves Technology more than Anything
Bhargava always wanted to amalgamate his passion for technology with his entrepreneurial streak. The result of which was i2space, the company which has grown to become a travel expertise leader not only as a technology service provider to the travel industry, but also as the fastest growing SaaS aggregator of travel services across India.
Bhargava’s interest in technology mingled with a sharp marketing acumen is something that makes him stand apart from the crowd in an industry where technopreneurs are booming. His strong will to build the value proposition for all stakeholders’ right from investors, customers to employees in the company has taken the i2space to higher growth.
He always looks for the opportunities and has an appetite to take term risks to make his goals come true. Bhargava has more than a decade’s experience in the technology sector, with domain expertise in the travel and hospitality, and finance sector.
Before venturing on his own, Bhargava had a successful stint at a London-based reputed asset management company; he was an architect for an architectural group that gives direction to the company from the technology standpoint, unification of data, data governance and IT Governance. He holds a degree in Master in Computer Applications from Kakatiya University.
Providing Updated Services and User Experience
These are the glorious days for the industry, as new innovations and cross technology platforms are emerging every next day. But thinking about the future and being advanced is the only way to survive, and i2space is well aware of that. Being one of the fastest growing travel technology providers in India with experience in instant delivery of Cloud based SaaS travel & hospitality portals, i2space strives to change the face of the Indian Travel and Hospitality sector via updated services and user experience.
Awaiting Future ahead
i2space is aiming for a turnover of Rs. 50 Crores for the next financial year. The company has already started expanding its travel and hospitality services to Zambia, Cameroon, Algeria, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Malaysia and South Africa. With vast experience, i2space is panning an automated analytic tool for travel and hospitality industry by the end of the year. The company is all set to develop company’s own AI based chatbot that will efficiently support the customers on a 24x7x365 basis and at the same time will bring down the number of support staff by increasing the net efficiency.
Insights Success is The Best Business Magazine in the world for enterprises. Being a progress-driven platform, it focuses distinctively on emerging as well as leading companies, their reformative style of conducting business and ways of delivering effective and collaborative solutions to strengthen market share. Here, we talk about leaders’ viewpoints & ideas, latest products/services, etc. Insights Success magazine reaches out to all the ‘C’ Level professional, VPs, Consultants, VCs, Managers, and HRs of various industries…