A Business Analytics and Data Visualization Solutions company, Infruid Labs is a brain child of Mahesh Yellai, who brings 18 years of experience in the technology industry. Based out of Hyderabad, the company has been offering software built for big data to provide actionable intelligence to customers by helping them find pattern in large datasets. Infruid—which is derived from two words—information and druid (a wise man from the Iron Age who learned all disciplines and was looked up to by the society for knowledge and wisdom), believes in brewing magic potions that makes their customers invincible.
Yellai, who is a graduate with an MBA from Indian School of Business (ISB) and a B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IIT – Madras), founded the company to help businesses with data-driven decision making. With specialties in product strategy, competitor analysis, new product development, financial analysis and more, he has been instrumental in bringing out the company’s patent pending analytics platform—Vizard.
Analytics India Magazine interacted with Mahesh Yellai, where he explained us about Infruid’s analytics platform, how is it helping companies make data driven decisions, plans for the year 2018 and much more.
Q. Would you like to explain in detail about Infruid’s instant analytics platform, Vizard? How is it being leveraged by various businesses to carry data driven decision making?
MY: Vizard, Infruid’s patent-pending and award-winning Self-service BI platform, is transforming Infruid’s customers into data-driven Organizations. Vizard is helping our customers democratize analytics across the Organization, so that everyone in the organization, who needs to make decisions, has easy access to instant insights. Some of the best run businesses are using Vizard across Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR and Operations departments.
Q. How is Vizard different from other analytics platform available in the market?
MY: Vizard’s unique search-driven analytics capabilities are helping users derive deep insights from their data. Vizard uses Controlled Natural Language Processing techniques to translate ad hoc queries from simple English to visual insights. Vizard’s consume-grade user experience hides all the complexity of Big Data processing behind a simple search box, so users can type any question about their Business and slice and dice their data even at big bata scale to get visual insights instantaneously.
Q. What are the various other products and tools in analytics and data visualization offered by Infruid?
MY: Vizard is Infruid’s flagship analytics product. In addition, we also provide a data integration service that helps our customers connect to different data sources (cloud and on-premises) and extract, transform and load data into Vizard.
Q. Would you like to highlight few use cases where Infruid’s analytics platform has benefitted your clients in various domains? Who are some of your major clients?
MY: A leading industrial equipment manufacturer is using Vizard to help their Sales team optimize selling price and maximize revenue. The optimal selling price, for each of thousands of products, is determined in Vizard using historical data. Vizard has helped the Customer increase revenue by enabling data-driven pricing decisions.
A leading Steel manufacturer is using Vizard to derive insights from their inventory data integrated with their ERP software. Vizard has helped the Customer plan their inventory stock movement across their distributed warehouses and reduce their Inventory Holding Costs.
A leading renewable energy company is using Vizard to run their Network Operations Centre to analyze IoT data from their solar power plants and remotely monitor geographically distributed power plants. Vizard has helped the Customer lower their operational expenditure through preventive maintenance.
Q. How has been the growth story so far? Would you like to list some of the major milestones that you have achieved in your analytics journey?
MY: We have been in business for five years; and during the course of our journey, we have worked with customers across different Industries and different business functions. During the process, we have gained deep understanding of each of the domain specific problems ranging from price optimization to detecting equipment malfunction through sensor data. As we gained market traction and saw adoption of Vizard among some of the world’s leading businesses, we also won Industry awards. We were awarded best Enterprise Software Startup by HYSEA in 2016 and awarded one of 50 Emerging Startups by NASSCOM in 2017.
Q. How did the idea of founding Infruid conceptualise? Would you like to talk about the founding team?
MY: During my two decades of experience in the Enterprise Software Industry, I was fortunate enough to work on some category-leading products across multiple domains. A recurring problem across all those domains was that even though pre-configured dashboards were great for reporting performance metrics, they were useless for analysis. We realised that what the users needed was an ad hoc analytics tool that allowed users to not just report KPIs and business metrics but to perform meaningful analysis to support decision making. To address this specific need, we built a free form ad hoc querying tool to give users the freedom to perform advanced analytics on data of any complexity and scale.
Q. Would you like talk about funding?
MY: We raised a Pre-Series A towards the end of 2016 from a few angels from USA and China.
Q. How big is the analytics team? What are the skillsets you look for while hiring for analytics at Infruid?
MY: The most important characteristic we look for, when hiring new team members, is their problem solving capabilities. We are okay even if the individual does not have prior experience in building large scale systems or building insightful data visualizations, as long as the individual is capable of solving complex problems with elegant solutions and has the right attitude.
Q. What are some of the major challenges you face being a startup in analytics space?
MY: In enterprises, IT should own data and Business should own insights. But the challenge is that a lot of enterprises do not have clear separation of ownership of data and insights. Vizard gives enterprises the opportunity to bring in this separation to enable IT to focus on more strategic aspects of data infrastructure management and data governance, while Business can focus on queries and insights.
Q. What are the plans for analytics at Infruid in 2018?
MY: One of the reasons our Customers prefer Vizard over our competition is because of Vizard’s intuitive data discovery capabilities. Soon, we plan to release enhancements to our data discovery capabilities to support augmented data discovery. Augmented data discovery feature uses AI to auto detect patterns of interest from data and bubble them up to users’ attention.
