HBX Group (formerly Hotelbeds) was growing fast, but technical challenges were holding them back. With a hard ceiling of 5 billion searches per day and 20 years of technical debt, the team chose to upskill its engineers through the O’Reilly learning platform rather than replace them.
5 billion search ceilingPlatform hard-capped at 5 billion searches per day, limiting growth capacity and IPO readiness
Two decades of debtTwo decades of technical debt requiring urgent infrastructure modernization
Modernize without knowledge lossTransform engineering skills at scale without losing institutional knowledge
The O’Reilly solution
Skills for modernizationTrained engineering teams on new technologies to modernize infrastructure
Training for the jobFocused training on technologies its teams would need on the job
Reskill and retainRetained the full existing engineering team through reskilling rather than rehiring
Results
Here’s how investing in learning translated into measurable business results.
5Bto 10B+ searches per day, with no remaining capacity limit
0minutes of system downtime, down from 882 minutes
40%reduction in on-call services
$1.7Bto approximately $5B in company valuation, with zero team attrition
Takeaway
HBX Group proved that the fastest path to an IPO isn’t always hiring more engineers
Sometimes it’s investing in the ones you already have. With O’Reilly, the team transformed its platform, eliminated 20 years of technical debt, and nearly tripled its value without losing a single person.
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