Helical Insight – An Open Source Business Intelligence Product Helping Businesses Derive Insights Out of Complex Business Data

Helical Insight Story
Indian Startup Stories

In this digital age, organizations have more data than ever at their disposal. And those who work with data know how difficult it is to derive meaningful insights from that data and convert that knowledge into action.

In the era where organisations largely depend on data and embrace the power of data and technology, there is a need for BI products that could generate meaningful insights from the data.

Helical Insight is one such Open Source BI product that enables businesses to make data-driven decisions and succeed in their domain.

Open Source Business Intelligence Product | Helical Insight

Founded by Nikhilesh Tiwari and Nitin Sahu, Helical Insight is an Open Source Business Intelligence Framework that enables companies to make sense out of their myriad and complex business data and derive insights, thus allowing them to make better business decisions.

Helical Insight not only provides out-of-the-mill features such as email scheduling, multi-tenant environment, variety in visualization, slicing & dicing, mobile BI etc. but also empowers end users to add functionalities on the go using their in-house resources using the APIs, placeholders to add code and workflow.

Adding machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities into the product, Helical Insight will also very soon allow business users with zero technical knowledge to just type in their questions in their natural language and get immediate business answers in the form of data.

Helical Insight is also the first tool in the BI space to come with an inbuilt workflow that allows businesses to implement their own custom business processes.

Helical Insight Team
Team Helical Insight

Starting Point

Helical Insight is a product of Helical IT Solutions which had started as a service company that used to provide services in Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and ETL domain.

After working on tools like Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Quicksight, etc., and providing services to many clients, the founders thoroughly understood the kind of limitations and challenges with the existing set of BI products.

This led the founders to start the development of their own developer-friendly and extensible open-source BI product, Helical Insight, in 2015. By 2016, the startup had the first public beta release.

“Our vision regarding the product is to provide the most feature-rich Open Source BI product with features surpassing even the proprietary software but at a fraction of the cost. Most of the BI tools are extremely costly, and we want to change this. We want to provide the power of analytics even to small companies at a very affordable cost,” says Nikhilesh Tiwari in an exclusive conversation with The StartupLab.

Helical Insight product comes in a free open source version as well as paid enterprise version. Even on the paid version, there are various flexible pricing and payment options which includes one-time payment, subscription, core wise pricing etc.

The company is also very aggressively working on the next set of futuristic features including integration of machine learning algorithms, NLP engine, in-memory support, additional support of statistical and scientific charts, UI driven workflow engine etc.

Completely Browser-based BI Product

Helical Insight is a completely browser-based BI product, unlike most of the BI products, which have desktop-based development tools. This architecture even allows the option of embedding the report or dashboard designer also.

“We call our product a BI framework, and the entire product is built in a developer-friendly way. Hence, it is always possible to extend the features like adding a new chart, adding a new JDBC driver, adding new customization, adding new dbfunction, adding new aggregate function etc. There is extensive API support, every frontend functionality is supported by APIs, and there are also placeholders at multiple places wherein you can add your own code like HTML CSS JS SQLQuery Groovy etc. There is even the support of a workflow allowing customers to create their own custom workflow processes as well” says Nitin.

It is one of those rare products which not only offer data visualization (dashboard, infographics, mashups etc) but also support traditional pixel-perfect multi pager document kinds of reporting like invoices, salary slips, bank statements etc. Helical Insight also offers an inbuilt workflow within the product, thus allowing customers to create their own processes and flows.

“Being open-source, there is always a price advantage, and our prices are 70-90% lesser than other products. There is even a version that is completely free as well,” Nitin adds.

Present Situation

Working with a team of 39 people, Helical Insight, via its service wing, has served more than 80+ customers so far and helped them build their data warehouse, data pipeline and analytics across various domains and geographies.

Their client list includes the Government of Marshall Island, the Government of Kiribati Island, the Government of Micronesia, Tata Communication, Fractal Analytics, CA Technologies, Technip, Franconnect, and many more.

The startup is adding more tools and technologies expertise and is hiring more resources with expertise on these BI, ETL and DW skillsets. Using its product, the startup has served more than 50+ clients, including Smiths Detection, Davis Standard, KidsXAP, Envision Global Leadership, Oasys Cybernetics, Pratesis, Wealthhub Solutions, Timetrade, Cynet, Reify Health and many more.

Speaking of their expertise, Nikhilesh Tiwari says,

“As of now, our services expertise includes data modeling, data warehouse designing, ETL tools expertise on tools like  Glue Spark Talend Kettle etcBI tools expertise on tools like Jaspersoft Pentaho PowerBI Quicksight etc and various other big data technologies. We are adding more and more tools and technologies to our expertise, as well as adding more happy customers to our list.”

Future of Helical Insight

With both its product and services wing running, the startup is aggressively hiring people with expertise in java and react to be part of the core product team and BI developers. This will enable them to provide services and support to the ever-growing list of customers.

As per the founders, they will continue to invest heavily in R&D and make their product the most feature-rich open-source BI product. Also, the startup is aggressively working to double its client list using its product within the next year and plans to raise funds for product development.

“On the product side, we are aggressively working on a major 5.0 release of our product. There is a very futuristic product roadmap defined for the product on which we are aggressively working. We are looking to add resellers and integration partners who can help us sell to more customers, as well as service them,” adds Nikhilesh, while concluding the conversation.

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