Interview - Prithvijit Roy & Pritam Paul, Founders at Bridgei2i

Left to Right – Pritam Paul, Ashish Sharma, Prithvijit Roy[/frame]Bridgei2i launched their first app - Surveyi2i, a cloud-based survey analysis application which enables business users to conduct comprehensive analysis of their survey data in just a few clicks. Nearly every business today use surveys to understand their market, customers and employees, regardless of the industry, size and location. Surveyi2i is a simple, secured and affordable solution that helps users to derive actionable insights from research surveys, while delivering savings of:

1. 60-80% in research cost,
2. 75% of effort in analysis and presentation of insights,
3. 90% time in generating and sharing periodic trackers, and
4. Upto 80% in training budget & time.

Surveyi2i leverages in-memory data processing and predictive analytics algorithms to enable quick and easy interpretation of survey data. In an interview with Analytics India Magazine, Bridgei2i Founders Prithvijit Roy and Pritam Kanti Paul talk in detail about Surveyi2i. To read out earlier interview with Prithvijit Roy, click here. [dropcap style="1" size="2"]AIM[/dropcap]Analytics India Magazine: Congratulations on launching Surveyi2i. Interestingly, this has gained a lot of momentum in the market. We get to hear a lot of buzz around it and people talking about it. We would like to know from both of you about the product itself. [dropcap style="1" size="2"]PKP[/dropcap]Pritam Kanti Paul: Thanks for talking good words about it. The app i.e. Surveyi2i is our first full-fledged app from Bridgei2i standpoint. It plays in the area of analyzing survey data. There has been a significant amount of investment gone in collecting data. On the other side, there had not been too much of investment in analyzing this data. Majority of the data are being collected by agencies and analyzed by those agencies as well. There is nothing wrong with that but the issue that corporates face is the flexibility around analyzing that data. When questions arise you cannot answer those questions immediately and have to go back to the agencies. Secondly, in many of the cases the research managers are also handicapped by not having a tool which helps to quickly analyze data and see certain numbers beyond what is provided by the agencies. They fear that they might have to get into tools like SAS/ SPSS where they have to write codes and get those numbers, which becomes a daunting task. They either stop doing that or might go back to the agencies. Surveyi2i plays in that space where it makes analysis of survey data not only easy but also makes it much more available to people who are not able to do some of those tasks. It has some advanced analytics capabilities where you can correlate different events to find out what is really impacting the overall satisfaction about loyalty. It puts this whole eco-system at one place, is simple to execute and it really is providing the users not just data but also the analysis around it. And that is the real value of Surveyi2i. It has the ability to quickly upload the data, do data cleaning and management inside the tool itself, do as much cross-tabulation through drag and drop. Then relate different factor, do text mining. Other productivity features include moving any chart from the tool to other applications like PowerPoint. So while it makes some advanced analytics available for everyone, it also allows to do things much faster and in much more productive way. AIM: Can you also speak about the technical aspects of the product? What are the platforms it is available on and other technical aspects? PKP: We have used the cloud infrastructure in Surveyi2i. Right now we use Amazon web services. We use its security layer as well, we being very sensitive about the fact that analytics deals with sensitive data. And thus we have taken care of all the security aspect where people upload the data and its completely secure. The whole tool is developed by various open source softwares, the base of tool is java, we also used technologies like flex, flash to develop front end capabilities. The back end includes softwares like R, Python depending upon the use. It uses a lot of algorithm but all these algorithms are hidden in the back end and not visible to the user who is using it. [frame align="right"] Left to Right – Pritam Paul, Prithivjit Roy, Ashish Sharma[/frame]AIM: How does Surveyi2i fits across the broader roadmap that Bridgei2i wants to take going forward? [dropcap style="1" size="2"]PR[/dropcap]Prithvijit Roy: We being in the analytics space for last 15 years, realized that there are a lot of companies who want to be data driven in their decision making process and there are various needs in this process. One is the need to solve the business problem through data and that’s where there is a services play for players like us where we go in with our consulting layer and solve the business problem through our expertise. Then there is also a need for analytics to be available to even the business managers because you do not always want to rely on data scientists where the focus is to solve newer problems. So there is a need to give business managers an ability to do some analytics on their own which I call the consumerization of analytics. There are areas where we need to create applications and give to organizations of all sizes. Today, data analytics is available to large organizations but smaller organizations should also be data driven. On the other hand, these smaller organizations cannot afford a big data decision team. That’s why an application can help them get started. And that’s why we want to be in both the spaces. We want to be in services to solve a lot of problems but we also want to be in products space where we help consumerize analytics and become a catalyst for more companies to adopt analytics in their decision-making. Thus Surveyi2i is not just one app that we worked on. We probably would work on few more apps, one other area we are working on is forecasting. So we will select few areas that fit the whole thought process of other groups while we continue to provide services on data science. PKP: I strongly believe in two aspects. One, I think in tomorrow’s world analytics needs to be accessible to more number of people. I don’t think analytics would be a very linear process where someone asks for a question and we respond after few days. Post that the individual have another set of questions and then it comes back again. Some of those scenarios are more dynamic in nature. I remember 10 years back we used to take a month to work on a statistical model. Nowadays in certain situations, things change in 5 days. We cannot build a model in 15 days. This dynamism calls for a need to make it much faster so that we can change along with business. AIM: What are your plans right now to take Surveyi2i to market. What various geographies/ enterprises etc that you are targeting? PR: Our thought process with Surveyi2i is fairly different from how we approach our services business. It is very applications driven, and the core areas where there is a need for something like this is for e.g. customer service. In today’s customer service paradigm, organizations almost always send back a questionnaire to customers. So this is one area that can surely be consumerized by have Surveyi2i being available to business managers. Similarly, employee engagement is another area. All HR organizations float a survey but there is a need for larger deployment of continuous pulse service being deployed and becoming more popular. Today the whole survey execution has become a more of DIY. There are other areas like educational institutes, healthcare where there is need to understand what customer want, what experiences he has, where he is satisfied. So anything that involves extensive surveys really is where the product is useful. So, the approach would be look at business that can adopt it. Large organizations spend huge amount of money in collecting data through these surveys, so this is an attempt to reduce their costs. Similarly, smaller organizations who do not have capabilities to do such wide based surveys gets a tool easily on a cloud system that is affordable as well as easily accessible. These are the two areas that we looking at for more adoption. PKP: I think we would also see some innovation on the whole side of engagement model itself, as our plan on Surveyi2i take concrete shape in few quarters to come. Newer engagement models where we expect smaller organization running fewer surveys to have a certain level of flexibility to work with us. All of those are on cards in the days to come. AIM: What is initial traction you are seeing from customers for Surveyi2i? PKP: We ran the product through few beta customers who gave us comments on what updates we need to do with the product. I think the common theme we heard from them is that it is that it is making things much easier for them. As researcher, they get more flexibility in looking at data very quickly and run analysis. Even in last few days when we were going through the launch exercise, we got significantly good response. We also got interest either for partnering in certain areas or interest to look at the tool more closely such as a demo. I think we are pretty excited about what we are currently hearing. AIM: Anything else that you would like to add for our readers? PR: We would request all the readers to visit the site and try the app themselves. We would love to hear more from the readers about their feedback and their experiences with Surveyi2i and incorporate these thoughts in further releases. Listen to the complete interview below- [media url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE1QS2IROHU" width="600" height="400"]