Helical IT Solutions is another player in the crowded Business Intelligence (BI) startup space, but the tech company has just launched the world’s first open source BI framework called Helical Insight and hopes to make it a game changer.
Globally the BI industry is $16.5 Bn and the Indian BI industry is $160 Mn. Overall the industry is growing at the rate of 15%. Most BI companies in India are service – oriented while Helical IT is one of the few product –oriented ones. It gives Nikhilesh Tiwari, Co-founder of Helical IT Solutions reason to believe that Helical can leave its mark on the fast growing industry by being the first to disrupt with an open source BI tool.
“Open source is taking the market by storm. We have seen that happening with software like Linux, Apache etc. Even though Open Source BI tools are new to the market we have started seeing more and more adoption of the same. The biggest proof of this is that the three leading open source BI vendors were acquired within last 2 years - Pentaho were acquired by Hitachi for close to $600 Mn, Jaspersoft was acquired by TIBCO for close to $200 Mn and Actuate was acquired by OpenText. More and more companies are realizing the earning potential of Open source BI products and that’s why we are seeing M&A lately.”
Helical Insight promises to be about 90% more affordable than a BI framework which is close sourced. Nikhilesh believes Helical Insight’s capabilities in machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) collectively called “Instant BI” will make it easier for any non tech savvy consumers to use Helical Insight BI framework to get any business answers without too much hassle and time wasted relying tech support.
“Till now, for getting any data analysis, business users often have to rely on a developer to build a report for them which often takes couple of days. With today’s businesses on the move, business users needs data and analysis instantly since they need to make business decisions, and in those cases waiting for couple of days for a data analysis is not possible.”
Helical IT Solutions founded in 2012 managed to raise INR 2.5 million in seed funding within seven months of inception from a senior Citibank banker based in Singapore. The startup plans to go for a pre-series A round of funding seeking $2 Mn from investors based in the US. Typically a BI startup looks to raise $3-5 Mn in a first round while a four year old BI company is valued at around 60 crore.
To help you better understand how Helical helps businesses do better, Nikhilesh illustrates:“We have a client who is into energy analytics. They have installed different devices in US on transformers using which we fetch various parameters like voltage, temperature, power factor, wind speed, current etc. Now using Helical Insight we have built a data analytics solution on top of this data. We are able to do analysis and provide various reports and dashboards which talks about the energy consumption across various location, pilferage and theft of electricity, analytics of when a transformer might go down based on various factors so that electricity department can take corrective actions etc. This entire solution is hosted on cloud and their clients can login using their own credentials and see these information. Helical Insight is also completely screen size responsive, allowing the end users to access the solution from any device like mobile, laptop, tablet etc.
The energy analytics platform which we have built helps the end client to reduce their energy bills, reduce the transmission and distribution (T&D) losses and almost close to zero downtime because of prediction of when a transformer might go down.”
Business Intelligence or BI can be described as a set of tools used to gather and analyse data on a certain function (usually important to the functioning of a business) to help identify how to make the operation more efficient.
