Why Lycan Exists
A good place to start with an introduction of Lycan is to understand why it exists. Speaking on behalf of Rentivo, we built Lycan because of the challenges we faced with connecting property data from dozens of different vendors and suppliers.
In the early days of Rentivo our primary product was to create frontend marketing websites for agencies and managers, over time, those managers would then ask if they can share inventory from other users of the property management system we would be partnered with, then over time, they would ask if we can distribute rental data from third party PMS’s (property management system).
The PMS’s eager to help their customers with their distribution needs would then ask if we could help take care of the commercials (commission arrangement between the agencies ) since their product wouldn’t be able to process and track reservations for different customers, or process payments via different gateways.
Over time, Lycan was being heavily relied upon for our partners and to support cross sharing of inventory.
Moving forward, Lycan started to be used by various sizes of marketplaces, such as marketing sites with 12,000+ properties, and smaller booking engines where there would only be a few dozen properties. For all of these sites, the property data is coming from dozens of different property management systems and potentially thousands of different owners/managers.
The real world business problems which Lycan solves are issues which you would not know exist until you first face them – it solves a technical challenge and Lycan provides a well-defined workflow to help normalize different data structures from all of our integration partners and make it available via a single document.
If your software product is starting to want access to reservation data, regardless of which PMS the reservation came from, you can adopt a single API and get access to dozens of connections via a single schema.
If you want realtime pricing and availability for various integrations, or want to increase your reach/inventory you can adopt the Lycan schema to get access to hundreds of thousands of properties instantly from various providers.
Futhermore, as Rentivo started growing, we discovered quicky that our core product couldn’t grow unless we had features which our customers just grew to expect, modules such as channel management or automation rules. Historically, these were secondary to our core business, but without these components we couldn’t concentrate on our main product.
Lycan helps anyone in the same situation solve that problem by keeping you focused on your core product, while being able to take advantage of our channel management, our marketplace curation tools, central API etc.