Kolkata-based Ideal Analytics Solutions offers self-service data discovery

Ideal Analytics Solutions is a Kolkata-based big data and analytics company. Its main product is self-service data discovery platform that enables business users to access their data anytime anywhere and analyze it through an intuitive interface to discover hidden facts.

“We are trying to give the power of analytics in the hands of business users who have minimal technical knowledge,” says Co-founder Sanjoy Chatterjee.

What sets them apart, according to Sanjoy, is the proactive suggestion that Ideal’s product gives users.

“Our system is working for you and monitoring data even when you are not using the system. If you define your business rule, the system continues to monitor your parameters and send you alerts if there’s a change of trend or if you’re going off track.”

How it all began:

“Sukumar Chakraborty, my Co-founder, and I were colleagues and we were heavily involved in data mining (as it was called those days). We found that almost every company those days was implementing ERP system for more efficiency, but more than 80% of them failed to achieve the objective,” he says.

Even when the processes were defined, confusing ideas on work-flow, navigation of data through different business and a lack of standardization meant that the final outcome would not be ideal.

These days, there are also so many more sources of data. There’s social media, business networks, other market data all of which have to be worked into the equation.

“A tool that can handle the end-to-end business intelligence spectrum providing meaningful information to the business user-analyst was the call of the day,” says Sanjoy. “This trigger gave birth to our tool-solution called Ideal Analytics.”

As for the name, the founders were looking for something simple. “We had very less money for marketing those days and our first customer was in Europe. We needed a name which could travel across geographies, in many languages.”

Why Kolkata?

For us the big attraction was that ISI (Indian Statistical Institute) was in Kolkata. We were building an analytical product for which we needed statisticians. I feel if you need to develop a technology product then you should do it in Bangalore or Hyderabad,” said Sanjoy, adding, “But for a blend of product developers and statisticians, Kolkata was the best option. The cost of living and attrition rate is lower so we can keep our costs down and quality high as well.”

The sales and marketing team however, will be based in Mumbai, where most of the customers are based, he added.

Company facts 

The company has more than 20 enterprise customers like Salesforce, Blackberry, VMware, Euler Hermes, Serco and the big Health Care megastars along with more than 10 mid-sized clients. They also have 3000 cloud customer accounts of which about 300-400 are paid customers.

 The company will cross $1 million in revenue this year. It mainly earns license revenue for its products plus revenue from services it provides. “We earn from services and deploy them into the product. KPMG is one of Ideal’s sales partners with a strategic partnership agreement.”

Its clients are now mainly in Europe and India. The company will now begin tapping clients in the US, now the world’s biggest data market. “Once we establish our presence there, we will need funding for expansion. We hope to begin looking for investors in the second quarter or third quarter of this year.”