What does it take to get a start-up going? Well, nothing much; just a great idea, a few devoted professionals and, of course, funds. Helical IT Solutions seems to have them all. A company that started its operations in November 2012, it has already earned funds from an international investor and is poised to grow in a domain where growth is almost guaranteed-open source technology.
Helical IT Solutions Pvt Ltd deals with Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (DWBI). The founders of the company, Nikhilesh Tiwari and Nitin Sahu, chose the open source way because they are sure that if there is any domain in which growth is guaranteed, it is in open source technology. The range of services provided by the company include data warehousing, data visualisation, BI, ETL (extract, transfer and load), mobile and self-services BI, geographical charting, etc.
The two bank on open source not because it is a trend, but because they have learnt and understood the pros and cons of it over the years. Their tryst with open source began in their previous jobs, which they left to start their venture. Tiwari says, “In our previous companies we were working on open source BI technologies. According to the latest report by Gartner, the Indian BI sector is growing at 16 per cent and is expected to touch US$ 113 million in 2013 and US$ 172 million by 2016. Not only in India but worldwide, BI is one sector that is growing the fastest in the IT sector.
“So we thought of moving to the next level with our company. With the recession and sluggish economies, more and more companies are trying to adopt open source technologies because of the low cost of ownership. Seeing this kind of market growth and the higher adoption of OSBI technologies, we thought of monetising this trend. This led to our searching for clients, and even before starting our company full time, we had three paying clients with us,” Tiwari adds.
Since the team was already working on different BI tools, it could easily offer consultancy to its clients regarding what would be the best tool to adopt, whether or not they ought to purchase the enterprise edition of that BI tool, etc. Hence, not only was Helical developing the client’s solution, it was also acting as a consultancy.
Having begun the journey with open source technology, both Tiwari and Sahu want to continue down that path in the future as well. Tiwari explains that the biggest benefit open source technology brings is that without any compromise on the quality, the cost of ownership is the lowest. Hence, for SMEs and start-ups that have cost constraints, but do not want to compromise on the quality, open source technology is the best choice. He asserts, “With sluggish economies in the US and EU, we are now also approaching medium-sized companies, since they want to reduce their expenses and overheads. OSBI technologies often turn out to be 70-90 per cent more cost effective as compared to their proprietary competitors like SAP, SAS, IBM Cognos, etc.” The company currently has a team of eight people and will continue to hire to meet the requirements that come with its growth.