Interview with Nitin Sahu

You all know at ideasforideas , we have started a talkathon , interview sessions with the experts from different domain. Today I have chosen the domain of "IT products/services". I have taken the interview of Nitin Sahu , Who is the founding member @ helicaltech.com. I have liked his journey from student to entrepreneurship, and how he is shaping up the helicaltech at this time.

Me : Can you brief about the journey towards Enterpreneurship domain from student to this stage?
Nitin : I completed my Engineering from KKWIEER, nasik from that time itself I dreamt of working for myself. Then I did my MBA (IT) from SICSR (Symbiosis) to take it to next level. I planned my career when I was doing my MBA, first joined a small company and challenged my skill set for first few years. And then start my own. I was fortunate enough that the opportunity came to me at the right time. I started Helical Nov, 2012 and since then I never looked back. We as a team did everrything right to get our first customer and then to keep on surpassing their expectations every single time. Today, we have surved companies like CA technologies, Sage Human Capital, Pathways (an NGO) to name a few. They not just liked our work they simply loved it. 


Me : Do you believe in spirituality ?
Nitin : I believe in Humanity. I feel for humans, animals and all the creatures.

Me : How do you find this domain/work as a different than others , which things keeps you inspiring ?
Nitin : Work is fun for me. I never feel like working, it feels like I am just doing some regular work here at Helical. My team is awesome, my clients are awesome, and that keeps me going on and on. 

Me : Which are the current products you are serving , what those products do ?
Nitin : We at helical are highly focused company. We work with open source Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence tools. We provided services on Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Talend. These are the market leader in open source DW and BI space. These tools helps you to migrate data from one source to another source, helps create your own data warehouse from your transactional systems, helps visualize your data in different format, helps to create reports, dashboard, cubes and ahoc/self service reports. Apart from providing services on the above mentioned tools we have developed our own BI tool called Helical Dashboard Insights (HDI). HDI is a BI platform which helps you to customize your BI tool according to your BI needs. It is also a very developer friendly BI tool which is capable of developing reports, dashboards, cubes and ad-hoc reports.  



Me : Amongst all the service/products that you offer , which is service/product is getting more traction and from which indsutry i.e Manufacturing , Retail etc.
Nitin : DW and BI is a very generic space. Almost all the companies wants or they are already using it. Having said that we generally get a lot of traction from Energy domain, HR domain, Healthcare and Social Media.  


Me : How does helical tech's services differ from other service providers, how do you keep them competitive always ?
Nitin : Our services are not only of top quality but also cost competitive. We charge only for the productive hours unlike others. We closely work with clients, we envolve them in each stages of software lifecycle. This helps both the parties to avoid any surprises. Our process our super transparent and this helps our client to gain confidence on us. Since we are highly focus we generally don't take up work apart from DW and BI space. 
We always try to surpass the expectation of our stakeholders (be it employees or clients). This makes us competitive always.  


Me : While going through your website I saw BI at many places , Can you brief about BI at helical tech ?
Nitin : True, as said earlier we are highly focused open source Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence company. Bussiness Intelligence is generally used to get more insights about your data. It is also used to convert your data into information and then to knowledge and finally to wisdom. BI can also help you extract the data from multiple data source like facebook, youtube, google analytics, web services, structured data like databases etc. Using BI you can convert your raw data into beautiful charts which can help your business users better understand their data and take good decision. In other words as the name suggest BI can help you run your business more intelligently as it impowers you with all the input which you needed from your raw data. 


Me : What do you think about Indian economy at this stage , do you foresee a great future , how are you planning to expand the markets in India ?
Nitin : I feel Indian economy is going strong and I see a great future ahead. I was not surprised by many big fishes coming and investing heavily on Indian Startup / Indian Company. We are currently getting a lot of traction from US market and we would like to focus all our energy in serving them; India is a best place to build your development team and we will continue doing so. We are currently expanding in Hyderabad and we are looking for good resources to join our team here at Hyderabad.


Me : Do you think you should develop the domain expertise in retail , because until now the India's Retail market is not Organized , Are you eyeing any opportunity in this domain ?
Nitin : Certainly, as I said DW/BI is nowadays used by all the company irespective of their domains. Retail is growing and growing like anything. We would love to discuss the opportunity and come up with something really great which can help retail company to serve their customer better. In fact, whenever someone starts to learn BI they start with Retail data. There is an famous story that is often told to illustrate data mining concepts which is notice by the BI tools. The story is about beer and diaper sales and usually goes along the lines of "Walmart found on Weekends that beer and diaper sales were strongly correlated.". It's an interesting read probably you should cover this story in your next article.


Me : How do you find the time for yourself from busy schedule ? Do you meet your old friends ?
Nitin : I reserve my weekends for myself and for my friends. I generally give my old friends a call on weekends and chat for hours. If they live nearby I visit them to have fun. I feel Human when you meet, talk, spend some time with your friends, family and/or your dear one. By the way one of my old friend is my partner with Helical. 

Me : Did you come across a struggling time while in this journey ? What are the symptoms of those ;) ? and How to overcome those.
Nitin : I won't call it as struggling time rather I call it as experience. I had experienced good and bad both the times during the journey. There were times when circumstances has really tested my patiences. Every day is an experience and it taught me good lessons. It taught me to stay calm, be patient, help others and challenge yourself every day. In tough times what matters is how you face them and that defines you. To overcome bad times I generally take a break focus on something good, talk to friends and family and then start generating ideas to solve the problems.  


Me : How do you describe your challening role at Helical Tech ?
Nitin : I am currently holding multiple roles at helical. My challenge currently is to get time to give justice to all the roles which I am holding currently. I think I need at least 48 hours a day to complete all my work. Another challenge is to build my core team. Finding a good resource in this domain is one big challenge. I am really finding it very difficult to get a rockstar resource.

Me : Can you give a small idea for ideasforideas.org readers about opportunities in this domain ? 
Nitin : There is a huge opportunities in open source Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence domain. As I said earlier, it is very difficult to find a good resource in open source DW and BI domain. I would like to take this opportunity to urge people to learn more about open source tools. It is not just free (FOSS - Free and Open Source) but the advantage of learning open source tool is that you can really open up the code and learn by your own. Almost all the companies uses open source tools its a huge opprtunity if you are a fresher and targeting bug companies.   

 Thanks Nitin for sharing your views with ideasforideas readers.