Helical IT Solutions Adds New Capabilities To Its Popular BI Product

Helical IT Solutions is making major changes in its game-changing Business Intelligence (BI) product Helical Insight’s version 5.0. So far the new version has already been downloaded by more than 2,00,000 individuals who are looking for the more efficient value for money BI product for their data analysis requirement.

The tech company launched the world’s first open source BI framework called Helical Insight in 2016. Helical Insight promises to be about 90% more affordable than other BI product’s. With version 5.0, Helical IT Solutions expects to bring a paradigm shift in how people see open source BI products compared to proprietary BI products.

“We have been working on this specific version for nearly 1.5 years. We are now releasing the snapshot version without the canned reporting and community reporting module. These modules will be added later in the first General Availability (GA) release alongside other additional capabilities,” said Nitin Sahu, cofounder of Helical IT.

The entire application is rebuilt as SPA (Single Page Application) with the latest upgraded React Framework and Ant design UI libraries. Being a single web page application, navigation across different pages is much faster. Usage of AntD for building all the modules gives a very consistent user experience. All the modules have undergone user experience improvements based on the user feedback they have been receiving.

“With version 5.0 and from now on, everything will be saved in a database unlike earlier when everything was being saved as physical files in the drive (reports, dashboard, metadata, canned reports, community reports, etc.). The new version can increase the productivity of the company and time required for BI resources in building required analysis by more than 80%.” added Nitin Sahu, cofounder of Helical IT.

For the unversed, BI refers to the application of technology, strategies, and practices that make way for collecting, analysing, incorporating, and displaying business information that allows a company to have better decision-making in the business.

As per a report by Fortune Business Insights, the global BI market is projected to grow from $24.05 billion in 2021 to $43.03 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 8.7% in 2021-2028 period.

According to a report by 360Suite, the global BI adoption rate stands at 26%. A 2019 report by Grand View Research claims that 46% of small businesses use business intelligence features as an integral part of their business strategy.

“Helical Insight’s roadmap includes features addition in machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) collectively called “Instant BI”. This feature will allow any non-tech user to ask questions from data and get required analysis with zero technical knowledge required without too much hassle and time wasted relying upon tech support,” said Nikhilesh Tiwari, cofounder of Helical IT.

In the 5.0 version, a new reporting interface has been introduced, making the entire process of creation of visualization reports with filtering and drill-down capabilities a breeze. This version allows a single click option for implementing drill down and drill through, separate rows and columns section, filters with advanced options for controlling and configuring display & value among many other features.

A new reporting interface has been introduced in Helical Insight, making the entire process of creation of visualization reports with filtering and drill-down capabilities a breeze.

“All these new features will help businesses do better by providing them crucial and time critical insights and analysis” said Nikhilesh Tiwari, cofounder of Helical IT.

The new dashboard designer module in version 5.0 allows for the creation of dashboards very quickly. It allows the single-click option of adding filters. All panels can listen to the filter without any additional effort. Additional options like pin, exporting, maximizing, editing, etc. are all user-friendly.

The File Browser of Helical Insight has undergone a major change in UI design and has been made more user-friendly. A few new databases support have been added, like Databricks, Athena, etc., and more and more data sources are in the pipeline according to the company.

UI of metadata has been upgraded to match the current design, i.e., using the latest version of React as well as AntDesign. UX has been improved as well as known bugs have been fixed.

“The upcoming GA release (after the snapshot release) will have additional functionality of “In-Memory” and “Cube” support. In-memory will allow loading data into local RAM memory, thus giving a very fast performance even with a huge amount of data. You can further specify the frequency of updates of this data. With the additional “Cube” approach data can be analyzed in various dimensions easily, and slicing and dicing will also become easy. Custom cubes can be created, which will be part of the metadata,” said Nikhilesh Tiwari.

“Being a major release with a lot of back-end, front-end, and UX-UI changes, this specific release took some time, but rest assured, the subsequent releases will come faster,” concluded Nitin Sahu