World’s first open source Business Intelligence framework-Helical Insight

September 25, 2016March 27, 2018 Geekopedia 0 Comment API, BI, Big Data, Dashboards, Data Source, Helical Insight, Helical IT, Indian Startup, Machine Learning, NLP, Open Source, Startups, tool

Helical Insight is a product developed by Helical IT Solutions. Development of Helical Insight had started in early 2015 and they have launched the beta version of Helical Insight in mid 2016 for end customers.Helical Insight is an open source business intelligence tool. Using Helical Insight, enterprises can connect to their one or multiple data sources and derive insights from their huge data. Data can also be fetched from excel, CSV, big data databases or APIs also for deriving insights. These insights can be in the form of reports, dashboards, geographical dashboards, infographs, statistical and scientific charts and thus helping businesses make better data driven decisions rather than intuition driven. Helical Insight is completely mobile and cloud compatible. There are plethora of add on features like alerting, email scheduling, exporting, user role management, real time reporting etc.

Being the first open source BI tool powered by machine learning, helical insight powers even non technical end users to do a search driven analytics by merely typing their questions and getting relevant business answers. Being a complete API driven tool, developers can add functionalities whenever they want without depending on the vendor for addon functionalities and capabilities. Also Helical Insight

Today organizations are generating a lot of data. This data is getting generated from various sources like softwares, ERP, CRM, HR softwares, finance software like Tally, social media APIs, salesforce etc. Though we are having data like never before and this data is a goldmine but most of the organizations are not able to get any kind of insight from this data. Also most of the data on these various data sources are acting as data silos and do not interact with each other. This problem Helical Insight is trying to solve by powering enterprises to derive useful relevant insights from the data.

The company has been Co founded by Nikhilesh Tiwari and Nitin Sahu. Nikhilesh is heading Marketing and Sales in the Company and is responsible for bringing Helical It Solutions new businesses and building client relationships. His educational qualification includes Engg followed by MBA (Marketing and Finance) from Symbiosis International University. At the age of 25 when people are planning for a career,he had already started efforts to start his own business. Coming from a defense background, he is a disciplined individual and believes in delivering beyond expectations. Nikhilesh past experience includes experience in Product Development, handling key accounts and sales. Having worked for many years in telecom industry, primarily in VAS domain,he has managed clients like Vodafone, Aircel and Idea. Before Helical IT, Nikhilesh started two other ventures, one was in education domain and the other was in healthcare IT space. Nitin, an ardent technophile, has got immense experience in Open Source DWBI industry with relevant experience in servicing clients like Wipro, Tata Communication, CA Technologies, Vortecy, Unified Social to name a few. His experience in Business Intelligence space includes various sectors like energy, insurance, healthcare, human resource, ecommerce etc. His educational qualifications include BE (IT) followed by MBA from Symbiosis. Like his partner, Nitin also planned his career during his MBA days and started working towards it. Nitin also hails from defense background and has traveled across India, an experience that helped him to manage the human resource for his company. People working with Nitin calls him ‘one man army’ and ‘Man of the people’. He had started another venture in Healthcare IT space before Helical IT.

Some of the several factors which makes Helical Insight unique as compared to other BI tools are as listed below:

(1) Instant BI : We are the first open source BI tool to offer integrated machine learning and NLP module. Business users will love it since this feature will allow them to type in their questions and get immediate answers from their database. At the backend we have implemented very complex algorithms to identify database, understand context, identify grammatical mistakes, apply filters, apply mathematical functions and show results in charts. Business users can type in their questions like “Show me top 5 selling products in last quarter”, “Geography wise count of products sold” etc and they can get immediate answers in form of numbers and charts. In today’s environment with business on move such a feature can allow business users to make decisions on real time.

(2) BI Framework Architecture: Helical Insight is the first open source BI tool which is completely API driven. This allows end customers to add any kind of functionalities which they wish for without depending ever again on the vendor. Hence this ensures not only all the business user’s requirements are met but also the solution is future ready for any new technologies or API or datasources or visualization engines which might come in near future. Use cases includes adding a new chart, adding a new data type, adding a new exporting type, building outlook plugin of the tool etc.

(3)Inbuilt Workflow: With an inbuilt workflow in Helical Insight, users can implement their custom business processes inside it. Any functional module of Helical Insight or even outside can be called at any time and thus any kind of client specific requirement or business process can be implemented.

For their product Helical Insight they have not raised any funding till now. Though they do plan to raise funding in future once their public beta gets over in the month of November. They have been getting very enthusiastic response from the industry and despite being in beta, they have already signed up more than 6 clients. Sectors they are serving currently are education domain (K12), clinical trials, energy analytics, IT and NGO.

Helical Insight revenue stream is from the licensing cost of the product. If the client wants they can build the solution using Helical Insight by themselves or they can take their professional services for building the solution for them.Within couple of years they want to see Helical Insight as a market leader in the Open Source BI tools. Features wise they can already boast of being most feature rich as compared to any other open source BI tool. Being in beta they have been getting certain feedback from end customers and are working on to incorporate them inside our tool. They are also working on adding more enterprise and latest features.

Helical Insight Demo