Startup Villa for You chooses Progress OpenEdge to develop their business applications and as a reliable, low-maintenance database
Products:
OpenEdgeChallenge
Faced with a limited amount of time and IT budget, Villa for You was looking for a software solution to get their business up-and-running from scratch.Solution
Enterprise applications built with OpenEdge and Vue.jsResult
OpenEdge enabled increased platform usability, providing guests an efficient booking platform for vacation homes in line with Villa for You’s core values.Full Story
Challenge
Thinking about traveling in Europe and want to stay in a unique holiday home? You may want to surf onto the site of Villa for You (VFY). Founded in 2020 by professionals in the travel industry, Villa for You’s goal is to provide the best personal contact and quality to help its clientele, starting with an easy-to-use booking platform.
What sets Villa for You apart from others is their high level of personal service to both homeowners and guests. To have a short line of contact with both guest and owner and make sure both have the best experience renting their holiday home as possible.
Villa for You’s team wanted to develop their initial platform to be a “middleman” between the two clients. In the back of his mind, Leon Kersten, CIO for the company and one of the main developers of the platform, wanted to create a reliable, low-maintenance database for the Villa for You’s backend. Through this, Kersten and the other developers would be enabled to have a stable programming environment, which in turn would help their frontend business.
However, the team was faced with two significant challenges; limited time to launch and budget constraints with their IT systems. Their ambition of creating a state-of-the-art platform and combination of startup-like obstacles, Kersten and Sybrand Welles, Villa for You’s CEO, saw these obstacles as opportunities to grow the company’s technology in effective ways.
In order to get the platform released in a timely manner, but also have it up-and-running efficiently, Kersten and his colleagues, turned to a product they had previous experience with: Progress® OpenEdge®.
Solution
When it came to searching for a product to work alongside what they had already developed, the choice was obvious for Villa for You’s team. Leveraging their previous knowledge of the product, the team began implementing OpenEdge and prioritized building the database.
Kersten was implementing OpenEdge while simultaneously building out their IT systems and vacation home rental business from scratch. Employee-focused applications, which enabled them to work in separate environments, in the core version based on the Progress product. Their website was also built out, but in a separate environment, soon following that, applications were made for guests and hosts. Kersten wanted to ensure the frontend and backend functions were working for each ideal user.
“OpenEdge provides us a stable database of alignment and gives us a very powerful ABL language connected to that environment to implement our business rules,” Kersten said. “ABL is an important language to us since many things we do are not automated completely now. Our other developer and I use ABL for a lot of small changes and querying when needed.”
Within its new database, the applications built with Vue.js and OpenEdge were able to be tested through developed processes.
Result
After two years of solid R&D, Villa for You successfully launched its own product. And vacationers were more than happy to be booking their unique holiday homes. While the frontend website had the proper functionality for general users, the database on its backend was active and running smoothly. The ever-increasing efficiency and stability of the database is also having a positive effect on employee productivity. Continued development of the system by adding new functionalities and expanding the available data on the basis of employees’ needs ensures that they have the right insights to provide guests and homeowners with the desired personal service. They are able to focus on creating additional applications for the business. And being in “startup mode” Kersten and his team have to keep on moving fast.
A key component of Villa for You’s recent success comes from one area; their knowledge of OpenEdge. Kersten describes how “powerful” understanding certain aspects is to create a platform like theirs.
“The combination of Progress Database ABL with a VUE frontend made that possible because we had a lot of experience in this language,” Kersten said. “Also, we understand how powerful that can be to program your business logic. Which has proven to be correct, because within a couple of months, we had our core functionalities operational.”
While the team understands one of their KPIs is fully optimizing its database within two years, however, Kersten says Villa for You is “just getting started” with their deployment of OpenEdge.
About Villa for You
Villa for You is specialized in the rental of high-quality holiday homes in Europe. They distinguish themselves from all other holiday home providers by personal contact and customized advice for both the homeowner and the guest. The company is a team of specialists, each with 15 to 20 years of work and practical experience in the travel industry.
The offer of Villa for You varies from luxury holiday homes with plenty of comfort and wellness facilities to authentic chalets in the middle of nature. To guarantee high quality, they visit all holiday homes personally. Everything is checked on site and they discuss and exchange experiences with the hospitable homeowners.
Villa for You is happy to offer customers the attention they deserve with customized expert advice. Villa for You’s team likes to think along with you to help you find the perfect unique holiday home.
“Giving our guests a great holiday is our passion, and it all starts with rock-solid advice.” For more information visit www.villaforyou.com