A brave team is the one which challenges itself every day, which is not satisfied with the status quo, and which is constantly improving itself and progressing. The alumni of NFQ Technologies at Kaunas Science and Technology Park (Kaunas STP) emphasise the importance of the involvement of people in the success of a business.
The roots of NFQ Technologies begin in Germany. One of the founders of the NFQ group, Darius Lebedzinskas, worked at the beginning of his business activities. Just a few years after the establishment of the company, the list of customers has now been complemented by leading e-business companies not only from Germany, but also from the USA and Lithuania.
‘I started to lead the company when I was just 24 years old, and I studied at the KTU Faculty of Informatics. We were full of youthful enthusiasm and we learned from our mistakes. From the very beginning we have been striving to create higher added value than our competitors. This strategy has proven its worth since the beginning. During the first ten years of operations, we did not even need any sales managers. Customers simply recommended other customers,’ observes Darius Lebedzinskas.
The head of NFQ Technologies, Paulius Insoda, one of the company’s first employees, says that the company’s growth has been and continues to be consistent and coherent: ‘When you are focused on customer success, long-term cooperation, and a positive working environment for your employees, it is natural that new people are eager to join the successful company, as well as having existing customers recommending us to future ones.’
According to Paulius Insoda, the right approach to the work is one of the reasons for the company’s successful development: ‘For our customers we are a technical partner which helps to strive for success rather than an office which provides programming services. We are concerned with ensuring that the NFQ solutions create a higher level of value for our customer’s businesses by helping them to grow and increase their competitive advantage. By helping others to achieve their dreams, we at the same time achieve ours.
The company head also emphasises the point that the major driver for a business is people: ‘They are more important than a good business idea. Persistent and motivated professionals will not only refine existing ideas and create new ideas but, when faced with challenges and difficulties, they will overcome them and will, sooner or later, find a way to achieve success.
According to Darius Lebedzinskas, most of the events were significant in the history of NFQ Technologies, but one of the first was the successful creation of our own product, named Swoodoo, ten years ago.
This system, which combines sophisticated data collection with processes and multiple techniques, has been ranked in the market as being the best flight search solution for its time. In 2010, this platform was acquired by the global leader in travel search, KAYAK, thereby complementing its own team of more than forty NFQ people.
‘Later, having gained expertise both in the investment field and in the technology development field, along with various investors and partners we started to create HomeToGo, the largest search engine for holiday rentals, and the Swoodoo success story helped us to attract many more people who wanted to invest than we actually needed at the time,’ says Lebedzinskas.
The startup, HomeToGo, has become an important part of business development. This is a relatively young, but very significant product which was started up in 2014 and which has great prospects in the future, its technical functions having been developed by NFQ Technologies.
The startup launched four years ago, and has already become the largest search engine for holiday rentals in the world, having grown into one of the most promising companies in the tourism industry and having changed the entire holiday rentals market. The technical development team in Lithuania currently includes more than seventy specialists and it continues to grow steadily.
At the company’s developmental stage the following factors were important: the first customer in Lithuania, expansion into the South-East Asian market, an open source e-commerce platform known as ONGR which was created by NFQ Technologies and which allowed already-existent large-scale e-commerce projects to advance, and the future trading company management product, STOVENDO, which is currently being presented to the market, and which is providing enabling to Omnichannel.
When the company was established in Kaunas STP it joined only a few dedicated people, and now NFQ Technologies employs more than four hundred professionals in their field, both in Lithuania and abroad.
‘Although it may seem irrelevant, the opportunity to be able to focus on business growth and development, with no concern for the premises, was definitely one of the important components. The business centre in which, every few months, you are able to take over more and more additional space does not exist. Therefore the possibility of undertaking technical development in Kaunas STP is a truly valuable addition. Quite naturally operating in a startup environment which is filled with young companies can be highly useful. Sharing experience, and organising training or knowledge-sharing events is also a benefit,’ notes the head of the company.