“Pack it in 20 months, or ‘pack it up!'”
On a December day in 2018, Mr. Hoang Nguyen stood in line outside the elevator before entering a small meeting room with 8 people in his team – the first members of VinHMS, a company specializing in providing technology products for hotel management.
Hoang Nguyen graduated with a Master’s degree in Information System Management from the University of Houston – Clear Lake, USA, and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology.
The first Solution Architect of Amazon Web Services Vietnam admitted that he knew nothing about the hotel industry. He also planned to build software for 2 years and then reconsider – a plan that seemed appropriate given the enormous workload required to replace the “number one” position in the industry. However, the plan was not approved by the CEO of Vingroup – who is famous for his speed.
The response Mr. Hoang Nguyen received was: “Complete and deploy everything for Vinpearl in 20 months or ‘pack it up’.”
“It sounds impossible, but that impossibility turned out to be our most attractive recruitment tool. Talented developers like to turn the impossible into possible!”, Mr. Hoang Nguyen shared in a letter commemorating 5 years since the establishment of VinHMS.
“Months turned into years. A few lines of code turned into 400 microservices on the cloud, a team of 8 people grew to over 400. A pilot hotel expanded into a corporation with numerous domestic and international customers. A few ‘test transactions’ turned into 70 million transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, millions of reservations, 10 million customer profiles, and much more.”
Ambition to conquer the Southeast Asia market, starting with Thailand, Singapore
“VinHMS is not trying to build a new hotel management software solution. We want to provide an open platform for hotels to implement business innovations. The most important thing about the VinHMS platform is that we can easily connect and integrate with various technology services to optimize costs, increase revenue, and enhance the customer experience at hotels,” emphasized Mr. Hoang Nguyen – CEO of VinHMS.
After 5 years of development in Vietnam, VinHMS recently announced its expansion into the Southeast Asia market, starting with Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Cambodia.
Illustrative photo.
According to data from Statista, the hotel market in the region is making a strong recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic, surpassing the scale of the peak period in 2019 by the end of 2023. Estimated for the period of 2024-2027, the market continues to grow steadily at about 4% per year to reach nearly $16 billion in 2028. Notably, the proportion of revenue from online channels is increasingly dominant, from 67% by the end of 2023 to a forecasted 78% in 2028. This opens up many potential opportunities for companies expanding in the tourism and hotel management industry like VinHMS.
To seize the growth wave in the region, Mr. Hoang Nguyen revealed that VinHMS has laid out specific strategies based on two main principles: openness and standardization, in order to develop optimized products for Southeast Asian markets.
In particular, compliance with international standards such as ISO 27001:2013 or PCI/DSS demonstrates the reliability of CiHMS and helps VinHMS’ solution meet the strictest requirements when integrating with leading hotel chains around the world. VinHMS’ leaders emphasized that this will continue to be the company’s direction in the near future to build credibility with international partners.
At the same time, the Open technology allows CiHMS to meet the localization needs of different markets, from integrating with VNPT to issue e-invoices according to Vietnamese law to connecting with local payment gateways in Cambodia (ABA) and Thailand (OPN). As a result, hotel owners and guests in each market will have unique experiences with the most optimized processes and costs.
“Product improvement is an endless cycle. We will always listen to our customers and partners to understand their needs and the challenges they face, thereby developing products with features suitable for each local market,” emphasized Mr. Hoang Nguyen.
