Helical Insight is a Hyderabad-based Open source business intelligence based startup. It is the first Open source BI framework to be empowered with machine learning and NLP, allowing people to do search driven analytics.
Today, we look into how Helical insight was founded, the story of its two founders Nitin Sahu & Nikhilesh Tiwari, and how they are solving the Business Intelligence Problems.
Kindly brief us about the company. Enlighten us with the foundation story and the brief details of the company’s initial days.
The two co-founders i.e. Nitin Sahu and Nikhilesh Tiwari had done schooling together.
We always wanted to start something of our own and tried a few things but unfortunately failed. We had also started a healthcare IT company and tried to provide software products to hospitals, labs, blood banks, etc.
But we didn’t have much idea about the healthcare domain (which had a lot of stringent regulations) and thus had to shut it down.
Having failed a few times we have had a good share of learning.
Since Nitin Sahu had been working in the DW BI ETL space for a few years now and knew the sector inside out we thought of starting a company in the same domain. That is how Helical IT was born.
We started the company as a pure-play services company and used to provide services in the domain of Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and ETL space, and that too focusing primarily on open-source tools and technologies.
We also raised angel funding and after that, we have been pretty profitable.
Over the years we provided services to more than 80+ clients including some big names like CA Technologies, Tata Communications, Fractal Analytics, Technip, Government of Micronesia, Government of Marshall Islands, Government of Kiribati Islands, etc.
While providing services over various other BI products we felt the kind of issues and limitations that are there in other BI products and that’s what prompted us to start working on and launching our own Open Source BI product Helical Insight.
Right now there are 51 clients who are using Helical Insight on their production environment across various domains and geographies we have had 8 releases so far and we are working on a major 5.0 release.
We provide our product as a developer friendly and extensible BI framework and that too in two versions i.e. a free version and a paid version.
Our paid version is also almost 85% cost effective as compared to other BI products without really compromising on the features.
Brief us about the Founder/CEO of the company. What kind of ethics and principles of working does he/she observe while running the business?
There are two founders in the company. Nitin Sahu and Nikhilesh Tiwari.
Nitin Sahu: Education qualification includes Engg. from Pune University from IT stream followed by Post Graduation specializing in the domain of Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence.
Nitin has got experience working in startups as well as MNCs like Wipro. In the company, Nitin is taking care of Product Development, technology, and operations.
Nikhilesh Tiwari: Education qualifications include Engg from Pune University followed by MBA from Symbiosis. After engg.
Nikhilesh had worked with Siemens and then after his MBA, he worked for a few years in the telecom sector.
Nikhilesh comes with vast experience in marketing and sales. In the company, Nikhilesh is taking care of marketing, sales, and finance.
We have been very ethical while running the company whether it is our approach towards our employees, vendors, or clients. We are ok to not grow so fast but what is not OK is having an unethical approach.
Please tell us about the services that make the brand unique in the mid of rigorous competition.
We are a mix of both product and services. On the services side, we provide services on the below
Business Intelligence: We provide services on various BI tools which includes open source as well as proprietary BI tools like Jaspersoft, Pentaho, PowerBI, Quicksight, etc.
We consult customers, build various reports and dashboards, white labeling, embedding, and other services we provide.
Aside from that we also have got experience on the various stand along with charting engines as well as mapping engines.
ETL: We also help customers in building their data pipelines. We use various ETL tools like Talend, Kettle, AWS Glue, Apache Spark, and various other data processing engines to build the data pipelines.
Data Warehouse: We also provide consultation on designing the data warehouse, populating the data warehouse, best practices, etc.
Big Data Migration: For customers who are looking to migrate to big data technologies that is also something we help with.
We have got experience in various big data and NoSQL technologies which include Apache drill, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Hadoop, Presto, etc.
Apart from the above list of services we also provide our own BI product Helical Insight.
We offer our product both on subscription model as well as perpetual license model.
For certain customers, we also provide services on our BI product and help customers in building their various required reports, dashboards, white labeling, embedding, SSO, etc.
Kindly brief us about Helical Insight.
After having worked on various BI products and with various customers we saw the kind of limitations which were present in these existing BI products and that is when we had started the development of our BI product.
We launched our open source BI product Helical Insight first version in 2016 and right now it is on version 4.1. The product has been built on java and the frontend is react and it is a completely browser based product.
We provide it in two versions one is completely free and the second is paid version. Our paid version is also more than 85% more cost effective as compared to other enterprises’ BI software.
Our current version of Helical Insight provides various features like various methods of embedding, SSO options (like CAS, LDAP, AD, ADFS, JWT, etc), caching for better performance, exporting in various formats, email scheduling, self service drag drop interface for reporting, support of canned reporting, user role management, data security, workflow engine, support for high availability and load balancing and much more.
We provide extensive API support, various configurable XML files, placeholders to add code for additional functionality (HTML, CSS, JS, SQL, Groovy, Java) and the way we have developed our product is to keep it very developer friendly and extensible allowing clients to add their own features also.
Our initial set of customers were the customers to whom we had already provided services in the past, so we approached them and showed them what we are working on they were impressed and they were the early adopters.
As the product has grown and matured every year we are converting more and more clients and growing.
We currently have 50+ clients who are using our BI product Helical Insight across various domains and geographies like education, clinical trials, banking, security, manufacturing, etc. Some of the client names include Cynet, Timetrade, Reify Health, SmithsDetection, WastEquip, DavisStandard, KidsXAP, Unidesign Jewels, etc.
We are also working on next generation features and our vision is to make our product the most feature rich and affordable open source BI product in the market.
Our roadmap includes in-memory mode support, direct support of various machine learning and statistical algorithms, an NLP engine for chat interface for deriving data insights, and much more.
Our vision of the product is to be the most cost effective and feature rich Open Source BI product in the market.
Brief us about the future of the company or the goal it has set to mark its uniqueness in future. Please share with us about the current industry scenario from your perspective.
We currently have 43 resources and hiring aggressively. We are hiring across all the functional roles including sales, marketing, development, social media, SEO, etc.
There are multiple consulting and development projects which we are always working on and as we are hiring more people we would be able to take up additional consultation and development work. We are also investing in adding more skillets which can be offered as services to customers.
Over the period of years, we have added a boutique of services into our portfolio which includes BI services on Jaspersoft, Pentaho, AWS Quicksight, PowerBI, and Tableau.
Our ETL services include AWS Glue, Apache Spark, Talend, Kettle, etc. We also provide services on DW designing and development. We will continue to add more and more services to our portfolio.
On the product side, we are working on adding new generation capabilities which include inbuilt machine learning and statistical algorithms, NLP support allowing users to simply speak and get answers from the data, a new generation UX of the entire product, in-memory support, UI driven workflow and much more.
In the future, we are also planning to open a few offices and have some partners across various parts of the world. We would be looking to get partners primarily in non English speaking countries.
We also plan to raise funding in the future which will help with our hiring, development, sales, and expansion plans.
Advise for the budding entrepreneurs who are trying to embark in the same field.
We would like to give a couple of advice to someone starting as an aspiring entrepreneur
- Build something in a sector wherein you know the painpoints and how you can tackle those painpoints. Otherwise in many cases the learning curve itself can be very long.
- Have patience. There is no overnight success and things take time. So don’t give up irrespective of the hardships and keep on fighting.
- Don’t try to start alone, have more than one cofounders with complimentary skillsets.
- Try to chase and create value for your clients, money will follow
- Never run out of cash. Always keep your expenses under control. Expenses can increase exponentially but not necessarily your revenues
Build fast and release fast. Do not wait for the perfect product/perfect feature.
Share your views on “Healthy work environment for any enterprise”
Only those organizations will be successful who wins the war of talent.
A healthy working environment can go a long way in making sure that you are able to retain talent as well as attract new talent. There are multiple things that can contribute to a healthy work environment which includes
- Having a flexible policies which include work from home, casual dressing, flexible holidays
- A good healthcare insurance policy
- A good compensation as well as increment for employees
- An environment with good work life balance as well as where employees feel engaged as well as able to learn and grow
- A place where employees can freely voice their inputs and feedbacks (both positive and negative) without being worried.