Helical Insight :Business Intelligence Platform helping companies

Helical IT, with their cost affective open source BI product Helical Insight, is helping companies to create various kind of reports, dashboards and other data analysis from their myriad data sources.

Introduction

I, Nitin Sahu, grew up in a defense family, often travelling from one place to another every few years. He finished the latter part of his schooling from Nasik wherein he met Nikhilesh Tiwari. He did his engg from Pune University (IT) followed by Post Graduation wherein he specialized in Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence. Nikhilesh Tiwari, also did engg from Pune  University followed by MBA from Symbiosis.

After our engg and Post Graduation we both worked in corporate setup and worked with big organizations as well as startups like Siemens, Wipro etc. Exposure to both big organizations helped in learning of the processes as well as startups wherein it was more exposure and hands on training.

But something was missing while working for others. We always felt restricted and wanted to do something of our own, be our own boss and make huge impact. We were both working in Hyderabad, in different organizations, and then we decided to do something of our own.

We dabbled in few ideas but failed but the learning never stopped. One of the last idea was a healthcare IT company. With this we tried to provide software solutions to hospitals, diagnostic centers, nursing units etc but unfortunately this also did not fly. Main reason being that we were not aware of the nuances of the sector and being healthcare a lot of standards had to be followed. All of these ideas we were trying was after office hours and on weekends.

Story behind the name

While we were dabbling and working in healthcare IT sector we had kept the name of the company thus founded as Helical because DNA is helix in nature. The name continued.

Helical IT is Born

I had meanwhile been working in the domain of business intelligence, data warehousing and data analytics. I knew the sector and technology inside out. So we tried and we were easily able to get few paying customers. One thing lead to another and soon we hired few resources and started the company as full time.

Initially we used to provide services primarily in the open source domain and later also acquired expertise on proprietary technologies also. Our expertise rested in the domain of data warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data pipeline, ETL and big data domain with tools like Apache Spark, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, PowerBI, AWS Quicksight, AWS Glue to name a few.

Over the years we served more than 80+ clients which included clients across different domains and geographies,  small companies to Fortune 500 organizations, NGOs, startups, SMEs etc.

Idea of Helical Insight

While working with these various companies and building their BI solution we often came across features and functionalities which were not possible in these products. There were not developer friendly and extensible and not to mention that they were extremely costly. That is when we thought of building our own open source BI product which can be developer friendly, extensible, supported by APIs, workflow and much more. The first public beta version of Helical Insight was released towards the end of 2016 and till date we have had 9 releases. 

We even provide our product in 2 offerings i.e. one is free version and the other is paid version.

Our product has a lot of features which includes self service drag drop interface to create charts maps infograhs and dashboards, canned reporting module, exporting, email scheduling, user role management, cloud support, mobile support, docker and container support, embedding, various options of SSO, load balancing etc.

We are also investing heavily in R&D wing and working on integrating next generation technologies like a NLP driven chatbot to answer questions from the data, integrating Machine learning and statistical algorithms integration,

The Vision

Our vision with this product Helical Insight is to empower companies of various sizes to be able to derive insights from their data. BI is generally considered a very expensive technology and with our open source offering we want to offer the power of analytics to everyone without compromising on the features. We wish to offer the most feature rich open source BI product to the masses.

 Progress

So far we have 50+ customers who are using our product in their production environment. These customers are from various domains and geographies. Most of our customers are from USA and India and then there are customers spread all across the world including Middle East, England, Australia, Israel, Indonesia, South America etc.

Some of the prominent client names includes AutoPlant, Smiths Detection, Pratesis, Cynet, Reify Health, Timetrade, Davis Standard etc to name a few.

On the services side also we will continue to add additional services offerings.

 

Website : www.helicalinsight.com

Website : www.helicaltech.com