Given the way, analytics as a field have grown in recent years, it is but evident the way many successful analytics service providers have mushroomed recently in India. By our estimate, there are more than 200 boutique Analytics firms, small to medium sized service providers with niche focus on analytics and related fields, operating in India currently. They could be as varied in size as 5 employees to 4000 employee teams. These are also the firms that have seen more growth in analytics space than some of the established players. It is not surprising that analytics is gaining popularity as a career option, and especially among the specialty organizations like the one’s listed below.

Analytics India Magazine carried out a survey in the analytics community to find out the most popular analytics boutiques of 2015 and we have listed them in alphabetical order. We did similar list back in 2013, we leave it to you to compare and enjoy reading.

BRIDGEi2i

Founded in 2011, BRIDGEi2i Analytics is one of the fastest growing analytics companies globally. They have a proven track record of building two of the largest analytics set-ups for HP and GE in the past. With offices in US and India, they offer analytics solutions for marketing, sales, supply chain & risk functions to a diverse portfolio of clients across industry verticals, including a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Furthermore, BRIDGEi2i has a well-balanced and fun work environment where employees get exposure by solving a variety of business problems across functions, industries and geographies using data science, delivered through a perfect blend of technology and services.

“Our focus is to enable sustainable business impact for customers. With the right balance of services and technology accelerators, our managed analytics approach helps customers operationalize analytics and accelerate business impact. With strong domain expertise, technology focus and the right talent mix, we are well poised to among the top global analytics firms over the next couple of years.’’ – Prithvijit Roy, CEO, BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions.

Brillio

Brillio is not your typical analytics services firm.  With a deep focus on helping businesses imagine and realize the possibilities around data and digital, Brillio Analytics blends the disciplines of big data, predictive analytics and mobility to enable businesses to more effectively compete and win in the marketplace.

Brillio brings domain and functional expertise in retail banking, utilities, consumer packaged goods, retail, technology, and the media and entertainment industries as organizations work to utilize emerging technologies to create new and unique customer experiences, achieve cost efficiencies, and gain competitive advantage.

The company has fueled growth and brought new capabilities to customers with the 2014 acquisition of Marketelligent, an advanced analytics solutions provider, as well as recent investments in Albeado – a software company delivering predictive analytics and causal modeling solutions, and Arundo – a predictive maintenance platform company for asset intensive industries. Brillio is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has offices in Bangalore and Trivandrum.

Blueocean Market Intelligence

Blueocean Market Intelligence is a global analytics and insights provider that assists corporations realize a 360-degree view of their customers through data integration and a multi-disciplinary approach, leading to more sound and better business decisions. 

We believe the most effective business decisions come from a synthesis of data streams. Using our 360 discovery approach, we ensure the comprehensive use of all available structured and unstructured data sources, enabling us to bring the best to bear against each engagement. Strong decision support is implemented by a harmonious amalgamation of analytics, domain expertise, engineering and visualization skills.

Many leading companies have benefited from our partnership in terms of financial growth, 360 views of their markets and competition and  improved customer acquisition, satisfaction as well as retention.

Blueocean Market Intelligence is part of the Cross-Tab group of companies (Cross-Tab Marketing Services, Informate Mobile Intelligence and Borderless Access Panels) that include more than 1,000 professionals serving the world’s largest companies from offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Dubai and India.

Cartesian Consulting

Founded in 2009 by Sandeep Mittal, Cartesian Consulting strongly advocates the power of analytical thinking when it comes to marketing. It’s vision is to be the best blend of marketing and analytical thinking.

Cartesian stands out for its proficiency in the Indian market. It has an exceptionally large and stable client portfolio with more than 40 clients across industries such as retail, eCommerce, finance, hospitality, QSR and others through its offices in Mumbai, Bangalore and Gurgaon. Cartesian is now rapidly taking its practice global with a new team and set up in Singapore to service its clients in the APAC region.

At its core, Cartesian works on customer analytics, marketing analytics, channel analytics, pricing and margin optimization and new advances in digital analytics and mining of unstructured data. The last couple of years have seen Cartesian growing at a very rapid clip and it is now gearing up to build solutions aimed at helping clients adopt Segment of One thinking, as well as democratizing analytics through DIY capability building.

Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics is a global analytics firm that helps Fortune 500 companies gain competitive advantage through deep understanding of consumers and making better data driven decisions. They deliver insight, innovation and impact through predictive analytics and visual storytelling.

Fractal Analytics has 900 people in 12 global offices around the world serving clients over 100 countries. The company has earned recognition from industry analysts firms, and has been named one of the top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics” by Gartner. The company is also featured in Business Today’s “Great Place to Work” issue.

Recently, Fractal Analytics acquired an artificial intelligence startup to further strengthen its IP in the area of Customer Genomics®. This is its second acquisition this year. Earlier, Fractal acquired Mobius Innovations, a context awareness platform that gathers information such as geolocation and open social media data and sentiments to strengthen customer intelligence to deliver personalized and contextual offers in real-time on mobile devices.

Gramener

Gramener is a data visualization and analytics company – Founded in 2010 by Ex-IBM and BCG leaders, addresses essential need of making the “consumption” of data – simpler, coherent across organizations and rapid.

Gramex: Data Visualization Platform (patent pending), is a flexible visual product builder with built in data connectors for major data sources (SAP, Teradata, SQL, Hadoop etc.) Gramex platform is the only Automated Analysis, scalable visualisation offering in the market with an ability to process arbitrarily large data real time on multiple servers.

With offices in California, Hyderabad & Bangalore, Gramener today has 70+ clients spread across Pharma, Media, Telecom, BFSI, Retail, Healthcare, Airlines ,Manufacturing, Education and Public Sectors who are served by 100+ Smart Data enthusiasts to solve complex business problems.

They are pioneers of Data Visualization in India and have been ranked 8th in Deloitte 50 Fast Technology Companies of India 2015. Moreover, they have won Lufthansa Pioneering Spirit – 2012, and were recognized as pioneers of tomorrow by Lufthansa, Canaan Partners & TiE-NCR. Additionally, the are recognized as “Top 50 Emerging” Companies in startup category by Nasscom.

Hansa Cequity

Hansa Cequity brings years of customer marketing thought leadership to all their clients. Their team of 400+ strong professionals bring experience in business, customer strategy, marketing, data management, analytics, digital campaigns management and social media to help develop customer-centric marketing strategy and implementation processes.

Over the last 8 years, Hansa Cequity has developed business expertise coupled with a passion for customer focus to provide clients an intelligent platform to reach all their customers individually and optimally.

The company has people with diverse skills. Hansa Cequity’s technology and data specialists have the tools to work with big data, build proprietary data cleansing algorithms, create data transformation methodologies and vertical-specific data models and dashboards. The team of  analysts at Hansa Cequity help derive insights to provide on-demand analytics to help their clients make intelligent decisions.

Exclusive to Hansa Cequity, are its digital marketing and campaign specialists who create and deliver innovative ideas that can be measured. The company has been credited with building some pioneering models in Predictive Analytics and the power of their analytics work has been featured in technology and marketing publications and also presented at the Predictive Analytics World Conference.

MaFoi Analytics

Ma Foi Analytics is a leading-edge innovator in advanced analytics solutions, serving varied clients across India, US, Singapore & the Middle East.

Headquartered in Bangalore and with an office in Chennai, we are powered by a team of 50+ passionate professionals ranging from data scientists and statisticians to marketing strategists and industry experts, who collaborate seamlessly to produce relevant and impactful outcomes for our clients.

We help our clients unlock value everyday with our domain-centric, outcome-oriented approach combined with our cutting-edge data science and proprietary big-data technology to turn business challenges into opportunities.

Ma Foi Analytics has been conceived by renowned entrepreneurs and experienced practitioners across organizations like GE, HSBC, TNS, IBM, Infosys, Capital One, Barclays, Genpact and Oracle. We are driven by a mission to help our clients become intelligent enterprises who not only leverage analytics to make better decisions but who also embrace analytics as a way of life in their organizations.

For our unique vision and pioneering work in the field, Gartner recently named us as a representative vendor in the June 2015 Market Guide for Advanced Analytics Service Providers, featuring 36 of the foremost advanced analytics providers in the world.

Manthan

Manthan is a Bangalore based company operating in the worldwide marketfor analytics software products. Founded in late 2003 by lifelong entrepreneur and CEO Atul Jalan, Manthan’s aim was to transform the role of analytics from decision support to decision making.

Their ability to bring together a unique combination of capabilities – deep understanding of business contexts, statistical sciences and analytics technology – has enabled Manthan to create the most comprehensive range of analytics products for the retail and cpg industry over the span of a decade. Which is recognized worldwide by leading industry analysts and over 200 clients.

The rise of digitalization and consumer-led technologies (social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and internet of things) have created new market opportunities for Manthan in creating disruption and customer value in the cloud computing and big data analytics market. ‘Consumerization of Analytics’is what Manthan believes will revolutionize the analytics market and in the next 3-5 years, Manthan intends to position itself as the global leader in analytics and analytics-driven applications market across industries.

A recent investment round of over $60mn in Manthan underlines their market success and potential of their unique, highly differentiated product innovations.

Tiger Analytics

Started in the Silicon Valley in 2011, Tiger Analytics is emerging as a leading provider of data science and data engineering solutions to businesses worldwide.
Founded by a strong team of data science researchers and practitioners, led by Mahesh Kumar (MIT, IIT-B) and Pradeep Gulipalli (UT Austin, IIT-M), today Tiger Analytics has a team of highly
qualified and experienced professionals working from their offices in India (Chennai) and the US (San Jose, Chicago).

Tiger Analytics is one of the few companies in India with most of
their consulting work in the predictive analytics and machine learning
space, and has signed up many marquee clients across industries. When
you walk around their office in Chennai, you get a warm feeling of
happy people excited about data and technology, getting work done in a
professional yet informal environment. A heavy focus on learning, an
employee-friendly culture, and emphasis on life beyond work, make it a
great place to work, which is also reflected in their attrition rates
that are well below the industry average.

The post 10 Boutique Analytics Firms in India you wish you worked for – 2015 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Everyone loves a good plot. There are movies that have fascinated us with a deep focus on various aspects of data science, like mathematics, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning etc.

Analytics India Magazine decided to compile a list of ten films that have left a mark on the global film industry and given a sneak peak into the world of analytics and data science.

However, this is quite a subjective choice and have listed them in alphabetical order. Also, we know that only ten are not enough, so we would encourage you to share your views and mention the movies that you think we have missed out and why in the comments section below.

Year of release: 2008

This movie gives insights on Newton’s method and Fibonacci numbers through the eyes of six students and their professor.

A math professor, Micky, decides to cash in at the blackjack table with six brilliant students from MIT using numbers, codes and hand gestures.

Year of release: 2001

This movie walks us through the life of the brilliant mathematician John Nash who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in game theory.

He combats schizophrenia, while working for the government breaking Soviet codes and ends up in the midst of a conspiracy. His struggle and the journey of self-discovery coupled with his love for numbers made this movie a must watch!

Here’s a clip of Nash Equilibrium explained in an interesting manner.

Year of release: 2015

The story presents the pros, cons and complexities of Artificial Intelligence in a fascinating plot. It explores the possibilities of robotics and data coupled with emotions and humanity. Also, the viewer gets to know interesting concepts around artificial intelligence like The Turing Test.

Caleb, a programmer wins an opportunity to spend a week at a mountain estate of his company owner, Nathan who explains that Caleb has to evaluate the reactions and emotions of a female robot – Ava. As they get to know each other more, Caleb gets involved in a plot to scheme her flee. Meanwhile, Nathan tells Caleb that he has been manipulated by Ava. Ava’s emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated and deceptive, beyond the imagination of the two men. Watch the movie to find out who lied.

Year of Release: 1997

Good will Hunting is about a stubborn, mathematical genius, who knows he’s smart but pulls back from challenges due to his shady past.

There are these four people, who want to support him, but he feels threatened by their help because it means abandoning his careless and laid back attitude.

In the scene below, Cayley’s formula is showcased stating the formula for number of labeled trees on n nodes. Then it lists 8 different unlabeled trees with 10 nodes.

Year of Release: 2002

This movie deals with predictive analytics. Set in year 2054, Washington D.C is crime-free as a future technology makes it possible for cops to know even before a crime is committed. Predictive crime fighting at its best.

It works through 3 people known as precogs who are psychics and can see the future crimes in the way it occurs. Through advanced technology, they are able to see and analyze the data and identify the criminal before the crime is committed. However, when John Anderton, the founder of this system is accused of one such crime, he sets out to prove his innocence.

Year of Release: 2011

A discussion on Analytics in movies is considered unrendered without Moneyball. It is probably the most definitive movie with use of analytics.

By betting against tradition and in favour of numerical analysis, General Manager of Oakland Athletics, joins forces with Peter Brand, a Yale graduate, to challenge old-school selection methods and reinvent his team using predictive modelling techniques.

Year of Release: 1998

The film Pi is all about maths and how we can use it for predictions. It personifies the power of mathematics, computers and analytics through it’s characters.

The mathematical genius, Max believes that mathematics is the language of universe and from nature to stock market, he can predict anything if he can find patterns and the key to the chaos. Looks like a data scientist’s delight.

Year of release: 2001

The film follows the story of a maths prodigy who takes revenge on a bank. 

Jim Doyle, a mathematician devises a formula to predict the fluctuations in the stock market. The story is an intricate game of stock speculation, personal vendettas and computer hacking. It gives a detailed insight into the evil, the good and grey characters in and around “the bank.”

Year of release: 2014

This film traces the life of the cryptanalyst Alan turing during the dark times of World War II. It gives a sneak peek into the world of coding in its nascent stages.

Turing joins a team of codebreakers at a secret facility to try to decipher the code of the German enigma machine while fighting his internal battles.

A socially awkward teenage math prodigy finds new confidence and new friendships when he lands a spot on the British squad at the International Mathematics Olympiad.

The post 10 movies that show the power of Analytics appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

2015 has been the great year for analytics startup funding in 2015, with more than $260M invested across 20+ deals, according to research done by Analytics India Magazine. This is more than the combined investment in previous 2 years – 2013 & 2014.

In 2013, the total funding to analytics startups was in tune of $115M. This included the big ticket Series C funding of MuSigma by Mastercard of $45M. Also, Fractal Analytics received funding in tune of $25M from TA Associates.

2014 saw the funding drop to $75M with no big-ticket investments that year (We consider an investment of more than $25M as big ticket).

2014 was a year of consolidation for analytics industry in India. We saw 3 big acquisitions in the year – Equifax acquiring Nettpositive, Nielsen buys Indicus Analytics and Brillio acquires Marketelligent. These acquisitions are not included in the funding numbers.

2015 saw the most vibrant funding activity with almost $260M invested in analytics startups in India. The big-ticket investments included Series D funding of Manthan, Series A of Pune based Saama Technologies, Series A funding of Antuit by Goldman Sachs and Series B of NCR based Axtria.

The biggest funding round in 2015 was Series A funding at Almost $79M. Yet, we did see big ticket Series D funding. Analytics industry sees very small angel or seed funding rounds. Most go unreported, if any.

In terms of cities, 55% of all analytics investment happened in companies based out of Bangalore. It was distantly followed by 14% in NCR and 13% in Mumbai.

2016 looks bright for analytics ecosystem in India. We already are hearing of Fractal planning to raise fresh round. Qubole and Tracxn raised new investment in January itself. Of course, we have the Prime Minister’s “Standup India, Startup India” to top it all.

To close this, I want to quote Arihant Patni from Hive India – “We are very excited about Big Data space and we think that there are a lot of young, smart entrepreneurs within the Indian ecosystem, that have aspiration to build data driven applications for global markets. We want to find them, invest in them and help them get what they want to achieve.”

The post Indian Analytics Startup Funding in 2015, more than $260M invested last year appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

‘The startup India, stand up India’ campaign by our esteemed prime minister, Mr. Narendra Modi has set a new wave of entrepreneurship encouragement in the nation. In recent research done by us, we estimate the amount of funding to analytics startup in 2015 to be in tune of $260M.

Being the inquisitive noses that we are, and as a magazine of the analytics community, we decided to find out how this initiative will affect our friends from the Indian analytics industry. We asked four common questions to some of the key players including startups from the analytics community, for their views and found some very interesting answers. Have a read below and do not forget to leave your views on the initiative!

Q: What do you have to say on this, being an analytics focused company?

Jaydeep Deshpande

Jaydeep Deshpande (Regional Marketing Manager, India at Qlik) enunciated that, of $18 billion pumped into Indian startups during 2010 to 2015, $9 billion was invested in 2015 alone! Clearly, there has never been a better time for start-ups in India. Thus, one of the most important aspects for startups is to “compete on analytics” as it becomes absolutely critical for the startups to stay ahead of the curve by engaging in data driven possibilities and by marrying new technologies right from the inception stage. In fact, he strongly believes that this initiative will help create a stronger ecosystem to foster innovation and startups in India.

Likewise, Ashwin Mittal (President, Blueocean Market Intelligence), responded that, ‘Startup India – Stand up India’ will encourage many new ventures leveraging digital media, thus indirectly creating opportunity for data mining. Since digital platforms generate huge volumes of structured and unstructured data as well as transactional or operational data, it creates an opportunity for analytics service providers like Blueocean to step in and help these entrepreneurs focus on their core business while providing them with core decision support.

Ambiga Dhiraj- COO of Mu Sigma

Furthermore, Ambiga Dhiraj (COO, Mu Sigma) believes that there are at least two opportunities for startups in analytics. The first is in serving the Indian market: Large Indian companies, and the public sector, are lagging their global counterparts in the use of analytics for decision support. This initiative could well serve as a market opportunity for new startups. Secondly, there is room for new products to serve vertical opportunities globally across many industries, and also horizontal opportunities such as the Internet of Things.

On the other hand, Anurag Shah (CEO and Co-Founder of Aureus Analytics), articulated that even though the overall plan sounds very promising, the execution of this initiative will be critical, as the public procurement for startups is currently referring only to the manufacturing industry and technology startups like theirs will not benefit much from this. On the brighter side, areas like patent rebates will be of great help.

Q: Has this initiative helped or affected your business in any way?

Shivkumar Shankar

Shivakumar Shankar (Managing Director, India, LexisNexis Risk Solutions) finds the campaign an incubator for good ideas, talent, innovation and economic growth. However, he said that it has not impacted their business directly. Since, they constantly look for opportunities to work with companies that complement their business strategy through a partnership, this initiative could prove to be a positive for future growth.

Similarly, Jatin Sawhney (General Manager, Information Services, Team Computers Pvt. Ltd) believes that this initiative has opened up many opportunities for them to cross-sell and up-sell their product and services.

In addition, Jaydeep Deshpande (Regional Marketing Manager, India at Qlik) commented that as a leader in visual analytics, they will be happy to help startups grow fast as they have been associated with organizations that have understood the need to marry analytics to their strategy and are, consequently, on a fast track growth trajectory.

Q: Do you think it will it actually boost the analytics startup community in India?

Jatin Sawhney

This was a critical question as it was directed towards the analytics community as a whole. We cannot agree more with Jatin Sawhney (General Manager, Information Services, Team Computers Pvt. Ltd) who said that the startups are growing at an accelerated pace and with them the analytics community will grow. With many new investments coming in, it’s going to change the way markets function today in India. With everyone wanting to strive toward growth, data crunching and number crunching shall play a vital role in attracting new technologies and talent.

Furthermore, Sony Joy (Founder & CEO, Chillr) remarked that analytics startups can focus on getting more data samples before arriving at insights which could change the way various industries function. Looking at recent acquisitions in India, data mining and analytics will play a very important role in developing sustainable business models in the near future.

Ashwin Mittal

While Ashwin Mittal (President, Blueocean Market Intelligence) added that, digital platforms have seen tremendous growth in the last few years and even existing large enterprises are looking at the digital channels as new business channels to complement their traditional approach. With a wider proliferation of internet through mobile devices, huge volumes of transactional and customer profiling, usage and behavioral data is being generated every second across India. All this data needs to be classified and analyzed and then presented to the decision makers. Thus, it will be a big opportunity for analytics service providers.

Anurag Shah

Disagreeing, Anurag Shah, (CEO and Co-Founder, Aureus Analytics) claimed that there is nothing specifically for the Analytics focused startups, the overall impetus to the startup ecosystem will have its positive impact. Although, analytics and data science are a critical component of all decision making teams, across every organization and every industry. Maybe with the government sponsored incubators and mentoring in place, it will allow companies of all sizes to experiment with analytics and experience the benefits.

Jaydeep Deshpande (Regional Marketing Manager, India at Qlik) anticipates that newer domains such as Big Data, Open Data, Analytics, Data Insights and Visualization are all opening up lucrative opportunities for Indian startup companies. In 2014, NASSCOM had released a report in partnership with Blue Ocean Market Intelligence, predicting the growth of analytics market in India to reach about $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18. Thus, this campaign will provide an open platform opportunity for local tech companies to integrate best-of-breed solutions, innovate new products and invent solutions for similar global demands. Startups play a critical role in spurring innovation, and India provides a very conducive and vibrant environment for entrepreneurs, especially with a plethora of opportunities around this initiative.

Q: Any new laws that you think will affect the analytics startup community?

Shivakumar Shankar (Managing Director, India, LexisNexis Risk Solutions) speculated that India is ranked 130th in ease of doing business by World Bank; he further added that, under the new scheme measures undertaken by the government such as 10,000 crore fund for startups, Single point registration, Self-certification, Ease in filing patent applications, Exemption of tax for three years and Credit guarantee funds for startups would help an individual set up their startups in a smooth and efficient manner.

Moreover, Ambiga Dhiraj (COO, Mu Sigma) conjectured that new investment capital, and simpler rules to set up new businesses, will raise the tide for all startups, and not just in analytics. As we have a critical mass of analytics talent in our country and all other things being equal, this program will add momentum to Made in India startups.

Sony Joy

Likewise, Sony Joy (Founder & CEO, Chillr) appreciated the government’s efforts to bring about a change in the way companies are incorporated and ensuring necessary compliance is enforced. Besides promoting an open and free market economy, easing the rules of starting companies will go a long way towards bridging the gap between small and medium size businesses.

We would like conclude by thanking our contributors for this article: Ambiga Dhiraj COO, Mu Sigma, Jatin Sawhney, General Manager, Information Services, Team Computers Pvt. Ltd, Sony Joy, Founder & CEO, Chillr, Ashwin Mittal, President, Blueocean Market Intelligence, Anurag Shah, CEO & Co-Founder, Aureus Analytics, Shivakumar Shankar, Managing Director, India, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Jaydeep Deshpande, Regional Marketing Manager, India at Qlik for their valuable inputs and insights on the campaign.

The post Analytics Community: Views on ‘Start up India – Stand up India’ appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

India is welcoming a new breed of entrepreneurs and has recently evolved to become the third largest base of ‎technology startups in the world. With about 4,200 startups in its kitty‬‬‬‬‬, it all comes down to the survival of the fittest.

However, our niche being the analytics community, we consider startups from different domains such as analytics services, analytics product startups in hospitality, marketing, etc. So, here are those top 10 fighters for the year 2016 (listed in alphabetical order) who have not only shown tremendous growth but also hold huge potential for their future.

Read:
10 Emerging Analytics Startups in India to watch for in 2015
10 Emerging Analytics Startups in India to watch for in 2014
10 Emerging Analytics Startups in India to watch for in 2013

Altiscale

The Altiscale Data Cloud is a fully managed Big Data platform, delivering instant access to production-ready Hadoop and Spark on the world’s best Big Data infrastructure. Altiscale is led by an experienced, renowned Hadoop team from Yahoo! including the Founder CEO, Raymie Stata, who was the former Yahoo! CTO and a well-known advocate of Apache Software Foundation & CTO, David Chaiken, former Yahoo! Chief Architect.

With development centres in Palo Alto, Champaign (Illinois) and Chennai and sales offices in many cities, Altiscale has grown rapidly in the last few years and boasts of many marquee customers across various industries including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Marketing and Digital Media & Gaming.

The Altiscale Data Cloud is “always on” & secure. Their solution is always up to date with the latest production-ready releases, so the end-users can take advantage of the most recent innovation.

Dextro Analytics

Dextro Analytics helps clients take better decisions by deriving differentiating foresight and integrating customized solutions based on their revolutionary Artificial Intelligence and machine learning platform. In a short span of time, Dextro has acquired impressive clientele in North America, South East Asia and Australia, the list including Fortune 100 companies.

Mr. Ajith Govind and Mr. Manmit Shrimali, co-founded Dextro analytics with the belief that they are re-defining the analytics and consulting industry. Dextro Analytics is building a rewarding culture with centricity on the client and employee. This is facilitated by creating unique policies which ensure continuous reward and feedback to each and every employee.

GlobCon Technologies

Globcon Technologies is an analytics company providing cutting-edge solutions in Big Data, Customer and Marketing Analytics, Social Media, Product Strategy, Market Research, Human Capital Management, Business Intelligence and Sales Planning.

At Globcon, we proudly position ourselves as a management consultancy with a focus on analytics to help our clients improve business outcomes. With real-time big data analytics solutions, our clients can accelerate decision-making in fast paced markets. They can also prepare for change by forecasting consumer trends using our predictive analytics package and improve their customer relations using our smart social media solutions. Our strong team of data scientists strives to provide actionable insights. With domain experts from Consulting, Finance, Retail, E-commerce, FMCG, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Sports we specialize in customizing our solutions for your specific needs. Our services come neatly packaged in easy-to-use interfaces.

Globcon was founded by Tanmay Bhandari and Vishal G., when the two shared their love for numbers and passion for solving real-world problems with data. They share over a decade of strong analytics experience, and have earned a reputation for attacking their customer’s hidden pain points. The company is based out of (but not restricted to) Mumbai. For more information, write to info@globcontech.com.

Incedo

Incedo Inc. was founded in 2011, when the technology unit of Indiabulls was spun out as an independent organization. With 40+ marquee clients in sales, marketing, data visualization, Interactive analytics and self-service BI, their analytics solutions are supported by a deep expertise in data management services for data collection, cleansing, consolidation and governance to ensure consistency in the use and maintenance of data.

Incedo is a Bay Area Headquartered technology firm with a track record in delivering large scale initiatives with the nimbleness, creativity and personal attention of a startup. They work with organizations in the Life Science and Financial Services verticals to implement business intelligence solutions that provide multiple perspectives and visualizations utilizing a variety of analytical tools and modeling techniques.

nFactorial

nFactorial Analytical Sciences enables enterprises to turn employee experience to customer loyalty. The company was founded by Dr. Arun Krishnan with over 17 years of experience in analytics and computing and his team has a combined experience of over 50 years across multiple organizations and countries in academia and industry.

Incorporated in 2014 in Bangalore, the year old startup is already in discussions with Healthcare, Retail, Travel, Hospitality, Banks, FMCG, BPO and IT services companies.

nFactorial’s real-time solution n!Gage provides leaders and managers with actionable insights to proactively Identify burning employee and customer issues immediately, design and monitor the impact of  relevant  interventions in real-time as well as engage positively with employees to drive customer loyalty and revenue. The platform utilizes a performance centric model to gather employee and customer feedback on a real-time basis. Deployed in the IBM cloud, the platform is secure, scalable, reliable and customizable.

Perceptive Analytics

Perceptive Analytics is a fast growing data analytics company focused on e-commerce, Retail and Pharma industries. Based in Hyderabad with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Miami, they boast of two of the Fortune 500 clients and TATA group company in India.

Their CEO, Chaitanya Sagar, is an alumnus of Indian School of Business and believes in using a Five Second principle. So, no matter how many GB the data, an executive dashboard must be intelligible within 5 seconds so their customers can start using it right away. Moreover. the clients get to work on cutting edge data analytics.

They hire data scientists and those with awesome analytical and programming skills, people who love to challenge and expand your capabilities. They have a weekly “POP (Present-Over-a-Pizza) show” meeting where everyone presents their own project and gets to learn from each other!

PropheSee

Founded in November 2014 in Delhi, by three co-founders, Ishaan Sethi, Harshil Gurha and Jitesh Luthra; PropheSee is a marketing analytics SaaS platform working with brands to help them take control of their digital data & make the most educated decisions in one consolidated platform.

In the progressive data analytics arena, brands are using multiple platforms to manage their digital presence which often leads to problems around data reconciliation & a significant budget & time waste. As a consolidated tool, PropheSee leads to increased capital efficiency. Additionally, by tracking end-to-end digital data, brands can take a much more cohesive approach to digital as decision makers are able to analyse each channel in isolation as well as any effects a channel may have on another.

They have raised their SEED round from the Indian Angel Network & Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India, marking the latter’s first investment in the country. Moreover, they were listed by SutraHR as among the 100 startups to watch in 2016.

Quantta Analytics

Founded by Malvika and Vinay Bawri, Quantta Analytics is a spatial and predictive analytics firm with offices in Palo Alto, Kolkata and Bangalore. They use analytics to answer three simple but powerful questions – who will buy from you, what will they buy from you and where will they buy it from. Clients use their services to drive revenue and reduce risk by creating synergy between their products and the customer.

Working for the energy, banking and financial, retail, FMCG, and fast food industries, they have built a unique Software as a Service (SaaS) to help clients understand their data effectively.

Their vision is to lead 21st century innovation by nurturing top talent to incubate ideas that bring elegance, simplicity, and productivity to everyday life. From better functionality to beautiful interfaces, their innovations will change the way their client’s work.

Repufact

RepuFact is one of the world’s best Review Management and Customer Intelligence solution for the Hospitality & Tourism industry. They track User Generated Content across 125+ different internet venues and 25 global languages to extract customer reviews of all kinds, forms & languages, analyse them and give meaningful insights and quantifiable scores across various functions of the hospitality industry. This enables organisations to measure their efficiencies, evaluate standards and plan improvisation on focused parameters while engaging with the customers effectively.

The state of the art RepuFact sentiment analysis engine uses our proprietary “Natural Language Processing and Semantic Algorithms” to identify “POS Tags” (Part of Speech Tags) in a review and return a “Sentiment Value Score” for each reference & mention.

All the sentiment value scores then translate into the aggregated scores at a Department level and for relevant Key Performance Indicators. RepuFact “Hospitality keyword Banks and Libraries” are derived and designed by our in house NLP experts and data scientist to create a world class “Ontologies and Taxonomies” for Guest Intelligence Analytics. Our average customer, a 40 room & 3 star property have seen multiple benefits of working with us.

Scienaptic Systems

Headquartered in New York, USA and its engineering center in Bangalore, India Scienaptic Systems is a new age technology and analytics company.

Their  vision is to infuse robust decision science in organizations. Scienaptic has added decades of analytics and functional experience to develop its own proprietary platform, called Ether. Built on a sophisticated big data tech stack, Ether is aimed at dramatically reducing friction in managing, exploring, modelling and lastly, distilling key actionable insights from data.

The purpose of Ether is to seamlessly enable everyday interactions between technology, business processes and humans. Scienaptic’s full suite of analytics solutions is aimed at reducing end to end development time by 90% and deliver exponential increase to our customer’s KPIs.

We pride ourselves in bringing together some of the best programmers, machine learning scientists and domain consultants globally available. Scienaptic founders, mentors and investors are an eclectic group of seasoned business leaders inspired by the shared vision to industrialize big data analytics and engineering at scale for businesses.

The post 10 Emerging Analytics Startups in India to watch for in 2016 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

In one of our recent research, we estimated a total of $260 million invested in Indian Analytics startups in 2015. But who are investors that became the part of India’s analytics growth story.

Here we list down the top 10 investors according to their investments (in descending order) in analytics industry in India.

Read similar story from 2014.

Carrick Capital Partners

With its investment of $35 million in Saama Technologies in June 2015, Carrick Capital Partners became the biggest investor in India Analytics growth story. Though headquartered in Silicon Valley, more than 60% of its employees are based out of India.

Carrick Capital Partners is an investment firm that utilizes ABV (Approach to Building Value) to operationally scale fast growing businesses that provide technology-enabled services. Carrick adds value by taking a concentrated approach and dedicating significant resources post-investment. Carrick helps scale great companies that deliver significant returns for investors, stimulating economic growth and positively impacting the industry landscape. Working directly with CEOs and entrepreneurs, Carrick fulfills a vital need for investment and growth expertise.

Temasek

In Feb 2015, Bengaluru-based big data analytics startup, Manthan has raised USD 60 million in series D round led by Temasek and Norwest Venture Partners. This was the biggest investment round that Manthan had since inception, which also make Temasek among leading investor in Indian analytics firms.

Incorporated in 1974, Temasek is an investment company based in Singapore. Supported by 10 offices globally, Temasek owns a S$266 billion portfolio as at 31 March 2015, mainly in Singapore and Asia.

Norwest Venture Partners

Along with Temasek, Norwest venture Partners invested in Manthan’s Series D of $60million in 2015. Norwest venture Partners is a global, multi-stage venture capital and growth equity investment firm. Norwest manages approximately $6 billion in capital and have funded more than 575 companies since inception. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Norwest has subsidiaries in San Francisco, New York, Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel.

Norwest also has investments in other Indian analytics firms including, Capillary Technologies and Qubole.

Goldman Sachs

Antuit Holdings Pte Ltd, a big data solutions firm, secured an investment of up to USD 56 million led by global investment bank Goldman Sachs, in early 2015. Antuit is a Big Data Services company offering analytical solutions to support Sales and Marketing and Supply Chain programs at retail, consumer products, transportation, financial services and technology companies.

Zodius Capital

Zodius Capital invested in Antuit along with Goldman Sachs in 2015. Zodius was also a founding investor in Antuit.

Zodius invests in and actively develops high growth and market-defining India-centric businesses targeting the Enterprise Software & Services, Big Data & Analytics and Consumer Mobile/Internet markets. The strong advisory team based in Mumbai adds significant domain expertise, operational experience and global networks to the portfolio companies in order to develop them as highly valued market leaders in both Indian and global markets.

Helion Venture Partners

Helion Venture Partners invested a total of $15 million out of $30 million Series C funding of Gurgaon and New Jersey-based big data analytics firm Axtria.

Founded in 2006, Helion is an early to mid-stage, India-focused venture fund with over $600 million under management.

Helion also invested in MoEngage, a mobile user analytics & engagement platform, in 2015.

Paytm

Mumbai-based logistics analytics firm, LogiNext, closed a $10 Mn Series A round of funding from mcommerce platform, Paytm. According to our sources, the entire funding process was completed in a week’s time-right from founders meeting to closing the round. From Paytm’s perspective, the simple rationale behind this investment is to build a logistics cloud for partners, which will be aided by LogiNext.

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal

Tracxn, a research analytics platform for private market investors, raised $10 million in a round of funding led by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart along with other individual investors.

Tracxn had also initially received angel funding from the Flipkart co-founders. Tracxn is targeted towards the VC industry, PE funds and Corp developments and monetizes via a subscription fee. The platform sources its data from various resources including blogs, Twitter, Google News, Alexa, Whois, LinkedIn and SimilarWeb etc and provides its customers with insight if a startup should be invested in or not.

Sunrise Capital GmbH

Flytxt, that has offices in Mumbai and Trivandrum in India, raised $11 million led by Sunrise Capital GmbH and Big Data Investments BV, in July 2015. Launched in 2008, Flytxt offers internal and external monetisation solutions for increasing revenue, optimising margins and enhancing customer experience. The company claims it has deployed its platforms with more than 50 customers across 32 countries and analyses data of more than 500 million mobile consumers.

Nokia Growth Partners

NGP is an independent fund sponsored solely by Nokia investing in companies that are changing the face of mobility. NGP offers industry expertise, capital and an extensive network, enabling entrepreneurs to build disruptive, industry-changing companies and take them to the global market. With offices in the US, Europe, India and China, NGP extends the reach of companies making their products and services local everywhere.

Indix, the cloud-based Product Intelligence company that provides analytics and insights for brands, retailers and commerce enablers, announced that it raised $15 million in new funding from Nokia Growth Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Avalon Ventures. Nokia Growth Partners has earlier also invested in Vizury.

The post Top 10 Investors in Indian Analytics firms – 2015 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

TED is a non-profitable organization, abbreviated for Technology, Entertainment and Design, devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” through TED.com. TED Talks share the best ideas from the TED Conference with the world Leaders, trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses, who talk about varying topics in less than 18 minutes.

If you put in the keyword ‘data’ on You Tube, you will get thousands of videos. In fact, on the TED Talk official website, we found about 556 TED Talks on data and about double as many on the TEDx YouTube channel! The whole point of this was to tell our readers that so much is happening around this space globally! Thus, we decided to bring some of the best TED Talks (old & new, organized according to views and popularity) in which Analytics was the core topic of discussion. You will see how people from different domains have integrated analytics in their work!  Feel free to add any more or tell us your personal favorite in the comments below!

1. Deb Roy: The birth of a word (190,751)

Deb Roy, is the co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs, a venture-backed technology company while also directing Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab, where he studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways.

In this TED talk, He lectures about new data-driven methods for analyzing and modeling human linguistic and social behavior. Starting with his own son – he had wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his newborn son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.”

This massive data collection and analysis proved to be the base of his work for analyzing relationships between television content and social graph. Bluefin has created a technology platform that analyzes social media commentary to measure real-time audience response to TV ads and shows.

The social structures that he talks about are new as the social media communication channels that are leading to their formation did not even exist a few years ago. Bluefin’s technology platform for discovering these kinds of structures is the first of its kind.

Further, he has authored numerous scientific papers on artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining, and information visualization.

2. Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books (163,421)

Jean-Baptiste Michel and his colleague Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jean-Baptiste is a Founding Director of Harvard’s Cultural Observatory, where their research team pioneers the use of quantitative methods for the study of human culture, language and history. In this talk, he looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world using an online tool created an online tool ngrams.googlelabs.com that has been used millions of times to browse cultural trends.

Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and holds an MS in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard. He holds joint academic appointments at Harvard (FQEB Fellow) and Google (Visiting Faculty).

3. David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization (154,630) 

David McCandless, a data journalist, draws beautiful conclusions from complex data sets and reveals unexpected insights. In this talk, he talks about turning complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. He believes that good design is the best way to navigate information glut.

4. Kenneth Cukier: Big data is better data (109,356)

Kenneth Cukier is the Data Editor of The Economist and co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. He has spent years immersed in big data, machine learning – and the impact of both. In this thrilling talk, he looks at what’s next for machine learning and human knowledge and dwells into the future of big data, technology and design.

5. Philip Evans: How data will transform business (87,458)

Philip Evans is a senior partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, and the co-author of Blown to Bits.  In this informative talk, Philip Evans gives a quick primer on two long-standing theories in strategy – Bruce Henderson’s idea of increasing returns to scale and experience and Michael Porter’s value chain. He argues that data will rule business strategy in the future and explains why he thinks these theories are essentially invalid!

6. Anne Milgram: Why smart statistics are the key to fighting crime (80,327)

Anne Milgram a criminal prosecutor from US talks about how and why she decided to use data to understand criminal justice in a different light. In 2007, she was appointed New Jersey’s Attorney General, where she realized that the criminal justice system relies too often on individual instinct and insight and fails to make use of the reams of data that are generated every day. She later founded the Arnold foundation, where she is the vice president of criminal justice to work towards a data driven justice system.

7. Susan Etlinger: What do we do with all this big data? (78,041)

Susan Etlinger is an industry analyst with Altimeter Group, where she focuses on data analytics. She has conducted independent researches and authored two intriguing reports: “The Social Media ROI Cookbook” and “A Framework for Social Analytics.” In this interesting talk, Susan Etlinger focuses on the need to deepen our critical thinking skills and move beyond counting things to really understanding them.

8. Shyam Sankar: The rise of human-computer cooperation (42,796)

Data mining innovator Shyam Sankar explains why solving big problems (like catching terrorists or identifying huge hidden trends) is not a question of finding the right algorithm, but rather the right symbiotic relationship between computation and human creativity.

Shyam Sankar is the Director at Palantir Technologies, a secretive Silicon Valley company where he oversees deployments of the company’s core technology, which helps law enforcement teams and corporations analyze giant, unrelated databases for clues to potential –  anything. Palantir technologies has been used to find missing children, to detect banking fraud, and to uncover the Shadow Network, a cyber-spy ring that stooped so low as to hack the Dalai Lama’s email.

9. Ben Wellington: Making data mean more through storytelling (12,594)

Ben Wellington is a computer scientist and data analyst whose blog, I Quant NY, uses New York City open data to tell stories about everything from parking ticket geography to finding the sweet spot in MetroCard pricing. Wellington teaches a course on NYC open data at the Pratt Institute and is a contributor to Forbes and other publications.

This talk was given at a TEDx event where he draws on some key lessons from different sectors and data analysis to make his observations about New York City.

10. Zack Johnson: Relationship analytics & business (2,899)

Zack Johnson co-founded Syndio Social, a company that helps organizations adopt change. In this TEDx Program, he talks about how human behavior, organization and employee relationships connect with data and analytics. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark discussion and connection in a small group. A 2010 NU graduate, Zack studied social network analysis and later collaborated on projects for the US Army, NASA, MacArthur Foundation and more.

The post 10 TED Talks on Analytics that you don’t want to miss! appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Understanding the customers and building a right audience for your product/ service had always demanded innovative and revolutionary ideas in the past. In today’s scenario, with the evolution of Analytics, Marketing is no longer a skill to be mastered by extraordinary folks, and has been revolutionized as a science that everybody wants to master and cash upon.

Beyond the obvious sales uptick and lead generation applications, marketing analytics paints the uniqueity of its own existence through profound insights into customer preferences, sentiments and trends. It offers a diagnostic view as how your marketing campaigns and initiatives are really performing and what it takes to assimilate great involvement with your clients in today’s world of omni-channel psychology. It involves gathering data from across all marketing channels and consolidates it into a holistic marketing view.

The availability of better analytical tools has added decision-making firepower to the portfolio of successful business leaders across the globe. And, this spurt in Analytics has aptly complimented the reaping innovation in the country where numerous innovative Start-ups are supporting this very trend through delivery of innovative analytics based marketing solutions.

The analysis sourced from Xeler8 Start-up Dashboard reveals that out of 400 analytics firms in India, almost 26 per cent belongs to the Marketing domain, spreading across various horizontals like Social media analytics, Campaign analytics, Sentiment analytics, Customer lifecycle management, Web analytics, Speech analytics along with comprehensive solutions (including those offering a range of services around marketing).

The vibrating landscape has approx. ~100 firms with more than 55 per cent incorporated since 2010 onwards, thereby, witnessing the growing advent of start-ups in this domain. These nascent start-ups have been building upon their strength in emerging horizontals like Social media analytics, Campaign and Mobile analytics by leveraging on the connected world to map customer sentiments, preferences and choice to ensure better ROI on their marketing expenditure. The web is clearly a major game in the world and almost all the customers are utilizing the power of social media to gain competitive edge, and it has given a significant push to this high volume.

The funding pattern too points in the direction of the mushrooming marketing Analytics sector. On one side, we have seen several innovative start-ups raising funds from marquee investors, the other side proudly reveals the real success of Indian Marketing analytics market with ‘Inmobi’ which has graciously fetched its sweet-spot in India’s Billion Dollar Club with a valuation of over US$ 2.5 billion.

With companies like Manthan, Inmobi, Vizury, FusionCharts, Heckyl, Tookitaki, Qubole etc. raising huge amount of funds; displays the growing confidence of investors towards this growing segment. The segment has seen over US $720 mn of funding with more than US $246 mn of funding accumulated since 2014 onwards.

The Marketing Analytics web is growing faster as more and more founders make a beeline for this sphere the game is bound to get more interesting. With emerging concepts like content marketing, speech analytics, sentiment analytics etc., the ability to analyse things will grow leaps and bounds. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that these young businesses get the nutrition they need to grow bigger and better.

The post Marketing Analytics Landscape in India appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Knowledge, expertise, perseverance and experience are key ingredients that go in the making of a business leader. Analytics in India, has gradually gained recognition and momentum, owing largely, to visionaries who understood the importance of this field and worked towards shaping it into what it is today.

In fact, time and again, they have proved themselves in the field of data analytics, being at the forefront of the analytics industry in India and leading the domain towards success with effectiveness, confidence and commitment. Proactive in their leadership roles, they have the courage to create an impact. You may find a few repeats from last year, but in each of these cases, they re-qualified with new achievements in the past 12 months.

So here is the list of Top 10 Influencers in the Indian Analytics Industry, presented in alphabetical order.

Atul Jalan

CEO & MD, Manthan Systems

Atul Jalan is currently CEO of Manthan and is permanently, an entrepreneur. Manthan is Atul’s fourth successful venture after MicroTrack, Cybertrek and Net Kraft. As CEO of Manthan, Atul’s single objective is to keep the spirit of invention alive at Manthan – a spirit that has seen Manthan create pioneering analytics solutions for consumer connect industries worldwide. Today, several analytics-driven Fortune 500 companies derive their edge from Manthan.

Atul is a well-known and frequently-heard voice on analytics and emerging technologies – leading to his being acknowledged among India’s 10 Most Influential Analytics Leaders in 2015. But a unidimensional analytics mutant, he most definitely is not.

He can be equally loquacious about aero-modelling, astronomy, quantum physics, Richard Feynman, Johannes Vermeer, quadcopters and the movie that released last Friday. And if you have the time and the ear, he’s got a few verses to share as well. Though when he finds the time, he prefers to go skiing with his son.

Deep Thomas

CEO at Tata Insights and Quants

Deep Thomas, CEO – Tata Insights and Quants (Tata iQ) Division, is a Global business leader and management professional with over two decades of experience in delivering sustained increasing profitability through business transformation leveraging Global processes, Information capabilities, Digital, and Advanced analytics solutions.

Tata iQ; incubated as the Tata Groups’ analytics and data powerhouse and drawn from the best analytics talent in the industry is geared to harness India’s largest conglomerate’s vast and rich data on individuals and institutions to drive superior customer experience and business performance.

Prior to this, Deep led Citigroup’s Global Decision Management Centre of Excellence where his team drove high performance insights and impactful analytic solutions across 36 countries. He has also held various leadership positions with HSBC and American Express in India and US to steer global agenda and business transformation leveraging information management and advanced analytic solutions.

Deep is Computer Science graduate with an MS in Information Systems and an MBA in Marketing from Arizona State and holds numerous patents in Decision Science and Information Management.

Mahesh Kumar

Founder and CEO at Tiger Analytics

Mahesh Kumar is the Founder & CEO of Tiger Analytics. Mahesh started Tiger Analytics in 2011 with a desire to bring his experience in management science to help organizations achieve superior performance through the application of advanced analytics. Tiger Analytics is one of the fastest growing companies in the analytics space, with a team of 100+ data scientists and engineers working out of the US and India solving complex business problems in the areas of marketing and customer analytics, digital advertising, social media insights, sales analytics, forecasting, pricing, risk, and supply chain & operations for its clients in various industries.

Prior to founding Tiger Analytics, Mahesh was on the faculty of Smith School of Business, Rutgers Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management. He has conducted research in the areas of data mining and statistical modeling and has successfully applied it to solve problems related to forecasting, pricing, promotions, and customer segmentation.

Mahesh holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research and Marketing from MIT Sloan School of Management, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay.

Mahesh currently lives in Silicon Valley part of California with his wife and son, and visits India frequently to work with his team in Chennai.

Noshin Kagalwalla    

Managing Director, SAS Institute (India)

Noshin Kagalwalla is the Managing Director of SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd, the Indian subsidiary of SAS Institute Inc – a leader in business analytics and business intelligence software solutions. He is responsible for architecting the long term vision, driving sales and customer strategies and maintaining SAS’ leadership position in the Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence market in India.

Noshin joined SAS in December 2004 as part of the executive leadership team and took on the responsibility of Managing Director in October 2013. Over this period, he has significantly contributed to SAS India’s growth and established SAS as a strong brand synonymous with Analytics, commanding over 50% of market share in the advanced analytics market in India.

Mr. Noshin Kagalwalla is an MBA from UCLA, an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Wright State University and Bachelors in Engineering from V.J.T.I., Mumbai. He is a veteran in the Analytics industry and has over 22 years of experience across business functions. Prior to SAS, Noshin held executive positions in multinationals such as Microsoft and TCS.

Prithvijit Roy

CEO and Co-founder at BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions

Prithvijit Roy is the co-founder and CEO of BRIDGEi2i, one of the fastest growing global Analytics Solutions companies. Prithvijit is a reputed analytics expert, thought leader and evangelist of data driven decision-making.

Prithvijit holds a MS in Quantitative Economics from the Indian Statistical Institute, and is no stranger to the analytics domain. He played a key role in setting up the analytics units for GE / Genpact and HP at a time when analytics was still not a well understood space, building both to a 1000 plus strong teams. With Big Data and technology gaining significance in enterprises, he then saw a huge opportunity in providing technology-enabled analytics solutions. That’s how BRIDGEi2i was born in 2011.

Over the last 4 years, Prithvijit has led BRIDGEi2i to significant growth, partnering with over 15 Fortune 500 clients in delivering value leveraging their “Personalization” and “Optimization” algorithm based business solutions. With the belief that sustainable impact comes from embedding analytics in the DNA of the organization, Prithvijit and BRIDGEi2i team are building artificial intelligence based technology applications such as M² for model risk management, S-Reco for sales recommendation and Extrack for customer experience management. BRIDGEi2i features in the Deloitte Fast 50 list in 2015, comprising of the fastest growing technology companies in India.

Read interview of Prithvijit Roy.

Ravi Vijayaraghavan

Vice President and Head – Analytics at Flipkart.com

Dr. Ravi Vijayaraghavan is a Vice President at Flipkart where he leads the Analytics organization. Prior to joining Flipkart, Ravi was the Chief Data Scientist and Global Head of the Analytics and Data Sciences Organization at [24]7 inc. – a silicon valley based company that builds software products for customer service and sales. At [24]7 Ravi and his team were responsible for invention, development, implementation, and optimization of all analytics and machine learning driven solutions that form the core of [24]7’s product offerings.

Before joining [24]7, Ravi held a variety of leadership roles at Ford Motor Company. His contributions were in the applications of computing and analytics to the design and optimization of business and engineering systems. He was the recipient of a Henry Ford Technology Award – the highest technical recognition at Ford. Ravi was also a vice president and part of the executive leadership team of Mu Sigma Inc., a Chicago/Bangalore based pure-play analytical services company.

Sameer Dhanrajani

Business Leader, Analytics & Data Science – Cognizant Technology Solutions

Sameer Dhanrajani is a distinguished and recognized analytics & data science thought leader and visionary known for his deep knowledge, innovation & topical approaches in analytics and data science space. His consistent penchant to spot analytics & data science trends and relentlessly curate best of breed analytics and data science consulting, services, solutions frameworks, methodologies have been remarkable.   Under his able leadership, Cognizant Analytics today is recognized as a leading player in the analytics & data science market space with an exemplary broad-based structure and an exhaustive repertoire of services framework, consulting methodologies, solutions and platforms spanning advanced analytics & data science spectrum serving global clients across industries. A fast tracker & well-rounded professional with over 19+ years of industry experience, Sameer has donned various leadership roles. Prior to Cognizant, Sameer was the Country Head for Fidelity National Financial. He also worked as Vice President – Analytics for Genpact.

Sameer is a core member of NASSCOM Analytics Special Interest Group; ASSOCHAM digital council. He was recipient of “Outstanding Leadership Award” at India Human Capital Summit and “Exemplary Leader Award” at Asia Pacific HRM Congress.

Sandeep Mittal

Founder & Managing Director, Cartesian Consulting

Sandeep is the founder and MD of Cartesian Consulting; one of the country’s leading analytics services firms.

An alumnus of IIM Calcutta, Sandeep has 16 years of experience advising clients across industries on their Analytics, CRM and Data initiatives. He has been a driving force in the development of an analytics practice across over 80 client engagements ranging from large Telecom organizations, retail brands with hundreds of stores, online businesses, financial services companies, luxury hotels and resorts, and restaurant chains. He plays at the intersection of direct marketing thinking, advanced analytics and integrated marketing management technology.

Sandeep is considered amongst the leading practitioners in the country when it comes to analytics and CRM and is a regular speaker and contributor on the topic. He was awarded the “Big Data Founder/ Entrepreneur of the Year” at the 2016 Big Data summit.

Sandeep founded his first startup (a software development and tech consulting firm) in 2000 whilst still in college, and also founded and edited an underground online music magazine. He then worked in the direct and relationship marketing field for a number of years before setting up Cartesian. Cartesian has now expanded its presence with offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Singapore, and currently has over 150 employees.

Read interview of Sandeep Mittal.

Ujjyaini Mitra

Head of Analytics, Bharti Airtel Ltd

Ujjyaini leads the Data science and Analytics department at Bharti Airtel’s mobility business. In fact, she joined Airtel with the vision to establish Advanced Analytics as a practice and infuse science in business decision-making. She plays the role of Subject Matter Expert in Analytics with a special focus to consumer’s Usage and Retention (UnR) across Airtel’s product family, Customer service Experience and Market Research. She has built a strong team of 6 Analytic brains at various maturity levels who are responsible in creating highly complex marketing models in Big Data space to achieve high revenue growth via right contextual marketing and enhanced customers’ life cycle value, which significantly impact the whole value chain of Airtel.

Prior to joining Airtel, Ujjyaini was leading Marketing & Sales center of competence at McKinsey & Company’s analytics hub – McKinsey knowledge center, India. Her work interest lies in the domain of Game Theory and Pattern Recognition and its application in Marketing Science.

She mentors budding managers of prestigious management institutes of India, including IIM Ahmedabad and IMT Ghaziabad. She has been invited as speaker and panelists at various data science conferences and she is a part of executive council of Data Science Foundation.

Read interview of Ujjyaini Mitra.

Vivek Ratna

Country Manager, Cloudera

Vivek Ratna, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus, is an industry veteran in the Big Data space. He is currently the country manager for Cloudera in India. Cloudera has been one of the leaders in the Big Data space with some of the largest enterprises across verticals using Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop-based, enterprise-ready platform to extract value out of data and create new business possibilities.

Prior to his current role, he had an extremely successful stint at Hewlett Packard Enterprise as the country manager of its Big Data Platform business in India. He worked very closely with few of the large enterprises in the BFSI, telecommunications and e-commerce verticals in helping them unearth the untapped value of data. He has also been an active participant and speaker in the Big Data/Analytics forums that are held by different organisations across India. Prior to getting into the world of Big Data, he worked in various other organisations such as Reliance Communications, Wipro and HCL in several sales and strategy roles.

Outside the world of Big Data, Vivek has the passion to read, especially on subjects related to politics, philosophy and history. He also loves to travel and be close to nature whenever possible.

The post 10 Most Influential Analytics Leaders in India – 2016 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

In May 2015, we conducted a survey of analytics leaders in India to learn their views and plans with respect to their companies, and their outlook for growth of analytics industry. Continuing with that study, we bring to you the annual Analytics India Leaders Outlook study for this year.

The 2016 Analytics India Leaders outlook survey, which is the focus of this study, conducted a total of 50 online interviews in the month of April 2016, among key decision makers in analytics industry in India. The purpose of the study is to gain clearer insight into the confidence level of business leaders from Indian analytics industry and to provide these executives with information regarding the perspectives and actions of their peers.

Overall, the responses have been extremely positive and sentiment looked better than the last year. As analytics move even further past the just being a buzz towards real adoption by enterprises, their leaders’ optimism about the growth and demand continues to climb for the second year in a row. Looking out over 2015, these leaders are significantly more optimistic about the analytics in India.

Here’s our last year’s study.

Business Confidence

All respondents expect the demand of Analytics at their organization to increase over the next 12 months. Thus, there is extremely high level of confidence in the industry currently.

Next, we asked the leaders to rate on a scale of 1-10, if they are confident on analytics being a key focus area for organizations globally over next 12 months –

• 47% respondent gave a perfect 10/10 score. This is higher than 36% from last year.
• Just 1 respondent gave a score of less than 7 out of 10
• Average Confidence score was 9.0/10, higher than last year score of 8.6/10

• Also, we calculated the Net Sentiment Score (Calculated as difference of % with score of 10s & 9s and Score from 0 through 6s), at 61%. This is much higher score than 49% of 2015.
  • Analytics leaders in India exhibit a large positive outlook towards the industry compared to last year.

• 94% of decision makers plan to increase their analytics workforce in next 12 months. This is slightly lesser than 96% from last year.
• Just 6% say that they have no hiring plan for the coming year.

Key Challenges

69% decision makers believe that ‘Unavailability of Analytics Talent’ is the major challenge that they face. The percentage is almost same from last year, where 67% decision makers believed that shortage of analytics talent is their biggest challenge.

This is in line with our earlier findings and is widely documented and spoken about. There is a huge demand for Analytics professionals across levels. The pool of resources is not sufficient to fulfil the current requirements. While the industry is collaborating with several institutes and organizations to fulfil these demands, the quality of professionals and experience still remains challenge.

• 59% of leaders believe that ‘Little knowledge of analytics among customers’ is a major challenge for them. This has also remained unchanged from last year of 58%.
  • Obviously, we have not done enough to propagate analytics understanding to a wider audience in the market. While Analytics and big data has been a buzz word around the network, very few understand how they can in-cash on it. And even fewer can identify the key areas within their business to apply it to.
• Few leaders are wary of competition; just 12% believe it’s a challenge for them (down from 18% last year).
• The biggest change came in how leaders perceive the demand of analytics. Only 4% believe that analytics demand has peaked, as opposed to 20% last year. It’s evident that the current optimism is due to an increased demand for analytics.
• Some leaders pointed other challenges like Data preparation takes too much time, difficulties in implementing new techniques into current infrastructure & cheap quality products being called Analytics offered at a cheap price.

Growth Area

We asked our respondent on what according to them are the biggest growth industries for analytics in next 12 months.

• ‘IOT / Sensor/ Predictive Maintenance’ is considered as a top area of growth in analytics by 69% of respondent. This has seen the biggest increase since last year – from 49% last year to 69% this year.
• ‘Digital/ Online/ Mobile/ Social’ comes at a close second at 67%.
• ‘Retail / CPG’ has gone down as a growth area for analytics – from 49% last year to 33% this year. So, as opposed to 1 in 2 analytics leaders believing Retail and CPG to be growth area last year, just 1 in 3 thinks to be the same this year.

Key strategic decisions

We asked our respondents on the key strategy decisions that they plan for the coming year in order to grow their business.

• 76% analytics leaders plan to collaborate with external partners.
• 74% are planning to grow their existing offerings.
• Just 16% plan to look for external financing in the coming year.

% of Advanced Analytics

We asked an added question, not directly related to the business outlook of the leaders. This is more to do on how the analytics organizations in India are composed.

We asked our respondents the percentage of work in their organization that involves advanced analytics.

• The biggest bucket comprised of 10-25% i.e. 20% respondents claim that the percentage of advanced analytics work in their organization as compared to other analytics work is in the range of 10-25%.
• Using this information, we calculated the average % advanced analytics happening in India. This comes out to be approximately 38%.
• Assuming there is no bias in this data, 38% showcases an extremely high amount of advanced analytics work happening from India.

Respondents’ Profiles

Here’s the profile of our respondents.

The post Analytics India Leaders Outlook -2016 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

For the last several years, several reports from think-tanks like McKinsey, Deloitte and Harvard have consistently forecasted that the demand for analytics professionals would supersede the supply. However, it is only in the last two years that the majority of organizations have started filling this gap like never before. In such a scenario, salary becomes an important factor for professionals looking for lucrative career options.

An initiative by Analytics India Magazine in partnership with AnalytixLabs, the focus of this study is to compare the salary trends amongst professionals, specializing in different skills and tools, while also providing an overview of the analytics salary in key Indian metropolitan cities as well as companies and across various experience levels.

Below, we have listed down the key takeaways from the study. For the complete study, download the report brochure from the end of this article.

Read Last Year’s report here.

Key Trends:

• The average analytics salary in India for year ending 2015 was INR 9.5 Lacs across all experience level and skill sets.
• There is an increase in the percentage of people, from 36.6% in 2015 to 42.2% in 2016, in lowest salary band as more freshers (specifically to analytics domain) joined the workforce.
• A large number of job openings and hiring happening for the less experienced in tier B cities, but with lower average salaries has brought down the overall average salary scene in the sector across the country.
• Conversely, the overall salaries in metropolitan cities, individually, has increased from 2015.
• On one hand, the Analytics professionals commanding salaries less than INR 6 Lacs has gone up from 36.6% in 2015 to 42.2% in 2016; while Analytics professionals earning more than INR 15 Lacs has increased from 10.5% in 2015 to 11.3% in 2016.
• Analytics professionals with salaries in extreme brackets i.e. less than 6 lakhs & more than 15 lakhs have increased, whereas professionals in bracket 6-15 lakhs have decreased since last year.

Salary Trends across Tools & Skills:

• Advanced analytics/predictive modeling professionals are paid the highest salaries compared to their analytics peers i.e. 12.1 Lacs on average.
• Big data professionals and data mining professionals get up to 9.7 Lacs & 9.5 lacs on average.
• BI, Reporting , MIS professionals get upto 7.1 Lacs on average and data engineer an average of 6.7 Lacs.

• Within Big data profiles:
  • Hadoop professionals command an average of 9.9 Lacs
  • Spark professionals command an average of 8.8 Lacs.
• NoSql/ MangoDB professionals receive an average of 11.1 Lacs.
• Qlikview professionals command marginally higher than Tableau professionals in visualization skill jobs – 9.5 Lacs vs 9 Lacs on an average.
• Within Advanced Analytics profiles:
  • On an average, professionals get up to 10.8 Lacs for R, vs 9.1 Lacs for SAS, vs 7.3 Lacs for SPSS professionals.
  • Python gets highest pay of 11.3 Lacs compared to R, SAS and SPSS.

Salary Trends across Cities:

• This year has seen an almost 15% increase in pay for Mumbai, from an average analytics salary of 9.9 Lacs last year, it has increased to 11.4 Lacs.
• This is closely followed by Bangalore with 10.3 Lacs salary, and a 5% increase from last year.
• The third runner up is Delhi-NCR, where the salaries of analytics professionals have increased from 9.4 Lacs to 9.9 Lacs. However, percentage wise, it ties with Bangalore as, it is also a 5% increase in one year.
• In the 6-10 Lacs bracket, Bangalore leads the pack with 26% earning within this bracket, followed closely by Pune and Hyderabad.
• In the 0-6 Lacs bracket, Hyderabad dominates with 46% of analytics professionals earning below 6 Lacs followed closely by Pune at 42%.

Salary Trend For Skills Across Cities:

• Mumbai tends to pay the highest across all skills.
• For predictive modeling / Advanced analytics, Delhi/ NCR has higher pay scales than Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, but for Data Mining, Pune pays higher than Chennai & Hyderabad while Bangalore and Mumbai have a tie for Big Data.

Salary trends across Experience levels:

• At entry level, almost 81% of analytics professionals are under the 0-6 Lacs salary bracket with an average salary of 4.1 Lacs.
• The salaries of analytics professionals increase by more than 50% for each level increase in their designation. From senior analyst to manager, the jump is more than 60% on average.
• The senior analytics professionals, with more than 12 years of experience can command an average of 24 Lacs as their salary.

Salary trends across Company Type:

• There is no difference in average analytics salaries for consulting firms, domestic players or captive centers. The analytics professionals in either of these spheres get up to 12 Lacs on average.
• However, Boutique analytics firms pay the lowest – an average of 7.9 Lacs, while large IT players pay 9.5 Lacs.
• Nonetheless, analytics industry still falls in the higher paying bracket compared to other industries such as telecom, e-commerce, manufacturing, advertising, media, etc.

Conclusion

Analytics is the driving force for meaningful insights that lead to better decisions. When open-source platforms like R and Python are rapidly increasing the adoption of advance analytics, the Big Data platforms like Hadoop & Spark are revolutionizing our ability to gain valuable insights from the huge treasure chest of raw data.

India, being a KPO hub, is at the helm of this evolution, and new skills requirements are coming up every day thereby increasing the training demand from organizations and professionals who need to up-skill and keep themselves updated. This change is not limited to new tools and techniques, but many new job roles within Analytics have emerged, in addition to the conventional business analytics roles, like Data Visualization Analysts, Big Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers.

Thus, on one side, there is tremendous growth opportunity as this industry is moving ahead, and on the other side, the rapidly growing and ever changing industry requirements mean that professionals have to learn new skills and stay abreast of new age job requirements, if they want to stay stronger and longer in the game.

In the near future, as salaries continue to increase, we may see professionals from other sectors honing their analytics skills and switching careers. In this regards, this report hopes to present itself as a benchmark for the analytics salary ecosystem in India.

Download the Complete Study

The post Analytics India Salary Study 2016 – by AnalytixLabs & Analytics India Magazine appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Analytics adoption among Indian firms dwarfs in front of global peers. We, quite often, get asked the question on how has been the analytics adoption by Indian companies.  This was, therefore an interesting investigation to understand the amount of analytics adoption amongst the domestic firms in India. Surely, we have seen it gaining momentum across all industry segments over the last few years; nevertheless, Indian companies are still slow when it comes to adopting analytics. However, most of the B2C companies in India have some kind of analytics function in them.

To carry out this independent research, we studied 20 large Indian firms that utilize relatively high analytics in their internal processes and score them with regards to their analytics penetration and maturity.

Read our last Domestic Indian Analytics Market Study

Broadly speaking, Indian analytics market can be thought of as having three sets of players- Service providers, Captive centres and Domestic market.

Almost 75% of Indian analytics market is dominated by service providers, these are those companies that provide analytics services to the end consumer of analytics – either domestic or out of India. On the other hand, those companies which have back offices in India are called Captives. A lot of analytics worldwide is being outsourced to India via these captives. They account for almost 20% of Indian analytics market.

Surprisingly, the domestic market consists of less than 5% of Indian analytics market. These are those Indian companies that utilize analytics for internal processes either through their own internal analytics teams or by outsourcing analytics to service providers. The focus of this study is to assess the domestic companies with internal analytics teams.

Since, the domestic analytics market is still in a very nascent stage, Companies in this segment are typically large private B2C companies in various sectors such as Banking, Telecom, Automobile, E-commerce as well as Conglomerates.

While the Indian Banking sector is primarily dominated by private banks such as ICICI, HDFC, Axis, Yes Bank and Kotak Mahindra when it comes to analytics; the public banks such as SBI are not far behind.

Taking the Indian telecom industry into consideration, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular have internal analytics.

Moreover, TATA Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra are one of the first to adopt analytics in the Indian automobile sector, while conglomerates such as Reliance Industries, L&T, Aditya Birla and ITC are the latest to turn to analytics.

Lastly, the Ecommerce industry in India is booming with Flipkart, Snapdeal, Myntra, Ola, Paytm, Quikr, being renowned brands to adopt analytics in their processes.

In the graph below, we have plotted these organizations on the basis of their analytics penetration vs. analytics maturity.

While analytics penetration is the metric that plots ‘how well infused the analytics function is’ within an organization; on the other hand, maturity metrics look at the quality and depth of analytics being done internally with the organization.

However, please note that these are relative metrics, i.e. these organizations are plotted on their relative strength on these metrics vis-a-vis each other. These cannot be compared to any other organization outside this study. Moreover, a high on this study might be low on global standards.

Following conclusions can be made from the graph:

• There is a slight negative correlation between maturity & penetration.
• HDFC Bank is the only company to be in the first quadrant. Given, HDFC was among the first Indian banks to adopt analytics; they have gradually ramped up the practice both in terms of size and quality of work.
• The highest number of companies seem to lie in quadrant II. This could be attributed to the expansion in analytics function. However, it seems to come at cost of depth of work being done with the function. Given that the industry is still at nascent stage, think of analytics functions to work more like startups and economies of scale are almost non-prevalent.
• On the other hand, SBI hovers at the bottom of quadrant III. The public sector bank has just recently adopted analytics.
• Flipkart has the highest analytics penetration of all domestic firms in India. The ecommerce giant has rapidly built up a large analytics and big data team internally over the past years. Snapdeal also exists in quadrant IV along with Flipkart.
• Quadrant III also has a large number of new age e-commerce firms – Quickr, Myntra, Ola, Paytm. The focus on analytics as a key differentiator is low or just building up for these companies. We would have expected these new age firms to adopt analytics much quicker than their older peers that are mostly bundled in quadrant II.
• Compared to two years back, Snapdeal has the biggest change in penetration, pushing it from quadrant III to IV.

We also looked at the top 20 Indian companies by revenues and discovered that just 8 out of these have any significant focus on analytics. The ones in Red do not have significant analytics and the ones in green have adopted analytics as a function.

*** Red: No significant analytics, Green: analytics function exists

The reason for low adoption is the fact that most large revenue companies utilizes/B2B/energy organizations which are always slow at adopting analytics.

Moreover, another facet of any industry is billing. During the course of this research, it was found that the billing rates for some of these larger Indian companies are not cheap anymore. Moreover, the sale cycles have decreased and in fact, all issues that the service providers used to complain earlier about are getting eradicated.

Even though the demand for analytics in India may seem to be increasing, yet looking at it from the global lens, the Indian domestic market still seems dwarfed.

The post Domestic Indian Analytics Market Study – 2016 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

There is no doubt that analytics is here and now & providing concrete value to thousands of organizations around the world. Also, India seems to play an important role in propagating analytics and data science as disciplines around the world. What we are seeing right now is a quicker adoption of analytics and consequently, a huge demand for companies that provide these services.

In this in-depth study, we evaluate the depth and breadth of analytics providers in India. We are often asked about the health of overall analytics industry in India. A true leading indicator of the growth prospects of an industry is the number of companies in that field. A decreasing number of companies indicate consolidation in the market, whereas an increasing number of companies and startups indicate that the field would bloom in the upcoming years.

There are more than 2,500 companies (of all sizes) in India providing analytics services. The number has grown significantly from last year. These also include peripheral services like training and recruitment. Given this volume, it’s obvious that analytics is buzzing with passionate pandemonium. With this study, we aim to bring some meaning to the chaos and clear the fog around the analytics companies scene in the Indian economy.

A thorough research was conducted by Analytics India Magazine in collaboration with one of the leading analytics training providers in India – Jigsaw Academy.

Read Analytics India Companies Study 2015

Read Analytics India Companies Study 2013

Read Analytics India Companies Study 2012

Key Trends

• More than 2,500 companies in India claim to provide analytics as an offering to their customers. This includes a small number of companies into products and a larger chunk offering either offshore, recruitment and training services.
• There is growth rate of almost 27% year over year in the number of analytics companies in India from last year.
• Moreover, the number of analytics companies in India are still very few in number, compared to the strength of analytics companies around the globe. In fact, India accounts for just 9% of global analytics companies.

Company Size

• On an average, Indian Analytics companies have 160 employees on their payroll.
• It is a healthy increase from an average of 115 employees since last year.
• On a global scale, this is quite a good number, as analytics companies across the world employ an average of 90 employees
• Almost 73% of analytics companies in India have less than 50 employees compared to 86% on a global level.

On dividing the companies based on the nature of the analytics services they provide, we found that 37% of analytics providers in India are essentially full service outsourcing firms; 47% analytics providers are boutique analytics firms, 11% are product analytics firms and only 4% were into training & education firms while just about 1% were staffing firms in analytics space.

Cities Trend

• Being the IT hub of India, Bangalore undoubtedly, continues to house the most number of analytics firms in India, i.e. almost 30%.
• It is followed by Delhi-NCR at 26% and Mumbai at 17% analytics companies.
• Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune are far behind with their percentages of analytics companies in single digits as reflected in the graphs above.
• However, these numbers seem to have not changed much since last year.
• In fact, Mumbai has seen a high growth in the average employee strength per company, which has more than doubled.
• Analytics companies in Mumbai have the highest employee strength on average (311 employees per company), followed by Bangalore (192) & Chennai (191).

Further, we also looked at the percentage distribution of type of analytics firm in each city. In Delhi/ NCR & Mumbai, the number of Boutique analytics firms are almost double the number of IT/ BPO firms with focus on analytics. Hyderabad, Pune & Ahmedabad, on the other hand, have a higher proportion of IT/BPO firms in analytics than boutique analytics firms.

Conclusion

The research figures and findings, the startling growth rates, plus my interactions with leaders from the industry all indicate that beyond being just an IT hub, India has the blinding potential to become a hotbed for analytics. It’s just that most of India doesn’t seem to know it yet!

Research, coupled with continued interactions with the industry leaders prove that data driven organizations are far better prepared to mitigate risks in businesses compared to others.

While growth is happening exponentially on one hand, the number of firms popping up are still a blimp on the giant IT canvas. That has to change to really make a global impact. Which is why, studies like these are a great way of shining a light on new and upcoming organizations doing cutting-edge work in the field of analytics and Big Data.

To close, we hope that this Analytics India Companies Study is able to provide readers with deeper insights on the analytics companies’ landscape in India.

Here’s the complete report:

Download the report

The post Analytics India Companies Study 2016 – by Jigsaw Academy & AIM appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Watching those sci-fi movies have sent us cold shivers and have left us with the never crackling experience of walking around mars, meeting Frankenstienish creatures or battling a war. Experiencing all of these as if it were real is all thanks to virtual reality. Not just movies, VR is trending down in various other sectors such as real estate, hardware, marketing and gaming, making a serious play for business relevance.

With companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung staking their fortune on virtual reality market, there is more than enough room for start-ups to make an impact. The global investments in AR/VR have been overwhelming with the data from tech advisor Digi-Capital showing that investments in VR touched $1.1 billion in the first two months of this year, far exceeding the $700 million invested during 2015. However, going by the data from research platform Tracxn, only nine of the 74 Indian startups in AR/VR have received funding.

While the startups struggle with various challenges such as infrastructure and network strength, the industry is booming and is evident with the companies that is adorning the list. We approached virtual reality startups in India and came up with 10 such start-ups (listed in alphabetical order) that is changing the way humans interact with computers and enriching the real world with an unrealistic approach towards videos, sound, graphics and more.

GazeMatic

Founded in the year 2015 by Karthikeyan NG & MohanRaj MS, GazeMatic prides in ‘Teleport Call’. Located in Bangalore, GazeMatic is the hub of all the de-facto companies in Indian startup eco system.

Believing in the fact that communication in a virtual environment is going to be the new way to connect with people around the world whenever and wherever you are, they have built up “THE CALLER”, a mobile application for Virtual Reality. The app is first of its kind voice caller application where you can teleport yourself when you are on a call with your friend.

Crossing a whopping 5000 downloads within the first month after releasing the product, without spending a single penny on marketing, it has more than 2000+ experience videos and the users have made 20K+ calls till now. Currently available only in Android Play store as a free app, they are all set to launch their iOS app and will also be soon on Samsung and Oculus store apps. Their major breakthrough is going to be releasing the app with Live Streaming feature which will make the app literally a teleporting app.

Majority of their users are from US, UK, Germany, Russia followed by India.

Grey Kernel

‘GreyKernel’ is one of India’s first Virtual Reality & Advance Visualization tech start-up and their flagship product “IRA VR” is one of the most successful Virtual Reality product from India on Play store.

It has received an overwhelming response within a few weeks of the launch and currently hosts content developed In-house by GreyKernel as well as curated from some of the Indian/International VR Studios.

Founded in 2015, GreyKernel’s first VR demo for Oculus Rift DK2 was featured among top 10 weekly downloads on RoadToVR, one of the leading International VR e-journal and in a few weeks’ time the company was able to pull off an International VR project. Whereas most of the Indian VR production Studios are focusing on creating Monoscopic 360 degree videos, GreyKernel is leading the space by creating Stereoscopic/Interactive VR content & solving engineering/distribution for their clients that involves real estate, media & publishing and marketing agencies.

Meraki

Meraki was founded in November 2015 by Arvind Ghorwal, Sairam Sagiraju, Parth Choksi and Agam Garg and is one of India’s first Virtual Reality content production studio for consumers as well as businesses. They create 360 degree films for events, tourism, sports, adventure, advertisements, experiential marketing, real estate, weddings, news and fiction.

The founding team comprises of graduates from IIT Bombay and a Filmmaker which best reflects the nature of the Virtual Reality content market which is a combination of technology and creativity.

The company has made an outstanding mark within a short span since its inception and has bagged six major projects from clients such as Star Sports, Network 18, Percept Pictures and Channel V. They also continuously try and explore the immense possibilities of storytelling in Virtual Reality by producing their own proprietary content. Both, ‘Strangers Again’ and ‘A Mumbai Summer’ were well received and are now available on Milk VR.

Asia Cup, which was held in February was Meraki’s one of the biggest projects in which they covered the in-stadium experiences of matches between India and Bangladesh and India and Pakistan at Mirpur, Dhaka. The India vs Bangladesh match that they captured was the world’s first cricket match in VR.

SmartVizX

SmartVizX Pvt. Ltd is one of the highest funded start-ups in VR space and offers a wide range of immersive and interactive VR solutions across devices such as mobile, laptop, desktop, tablet etc. SmartVizX has been named as ‘Start-up of The Week’ by NASSCOM under its 10000 start-ups initiative.

Currently catering to the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry, the company’s products VI-VIZ, ARCH-VIZ, ARCH-VIZ (Mobile) etc., offer features such as, controllable and interactive walkthroughs of entire project, view of immediate surroundings from balconies and other vantage points, actual simulation of sunlight during any particular time of the day etc. Potential customers can experience a realistic simulation, of how their future property would look like.

Developer Group, DASNAC, RockWorth, NIIT, The Quint, Interglobe Aviation, Express Avenue and Express Group etc. are some of its clients and further plans to bring VR technology to domains as diverse as healthcare, edutainment, gaming content etc.

SmartVizX has raised an Angel Round of $5,30,000 from the Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs. The company is already present in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Dubai and is in extensive talks to establish a presence in The United States.

SpectraVR

SpectraVR Studios is India’s premiere full stack Virtual Reality Content Studio. Based out of Mumbai, the company was founded in 2015 and is funded by Rothenberg Ventures, a leading investor firm based out of San Francisco.

The company excels at story-telling & has built a strong team of creative directors, designers, technologists and VR enthusiasts to deliver on a wide range of services. Whether it’s a live experience or creative media or animated 3D virtual reality experiences and games, SpectraVR is able to deliver quality on every platform in every vertical.

SpectraVR has already conceptualized & created over 30 VR experiences starting from December 2015, for various top brands in India such as Mercedes Benz, Maruti Suzuki, Kingfisher, Standard Chartered Bank, The Deltin Hotels, WonderLa Amusement Park, Red Chillies Entertainment for promotion of a song from their movie Dilwale, T-Series Music Company, Times Now news channel for their ‘Amazing Indians’ show with the Hon. Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, to name a few. In addition to these SpectraVR has developed VR games around Cricket & Hang Gliding sport.

Tesseract Inc.

Tesseract Inc. is an Indian hardware company that has created the world’s first 360 Virtual Reality Camera. Its vision is to enable everybody to capture memories in 360 and VR to relive them as if they are in the same moment back again. Imagine the next IPL where Virat Kohli hits a six, and with these cameras you would be able to feel as if you are sitting next to Virat but being completely at home.

It aims to completely transform the way you record, consume and share content. And all this with hardware/software completely innovated, designed and manufactured out of India.

Their previous technologies such as Methane 360 VR are being used by companies like MakeMyTrip, Tistus (leading real-estate firm in Brazil), Solund House (leading real-estate firm in Denmark), Nestaway, Grabhouse and other top travel and real-estate firms in India.

Tesseract is all set to launch their consumer grade 360 Virtual Reality Camera – ViCAM later this year which is the world’s smallest 360 Virtual Reality Camera.

Transcend

At Transcend their belief is going beyond limits. Founded in October 2015, at the Foothills of Shivalik ranges, Chandigarh, it comprises of a team of passion driven architects, thinkers, filmmakers, photographers, producers, technologists, R&D specialists, and developer.

With a focus on next level of interaction and storytelling, they are currently developing highly immersive VR content and applications for tourism, education, real estate, brand story, documentaries, events and education sector.

Trimensions

Trimensions is an award-winning digital services and UX design agency based in Delhi. It pioneers in both virtual and augmented reality in India and spans across different verticals including education, entertainment and enterprise.

It specializes in developing creative new approaches to train people and has ventured into 360 video production and AR for machine maintenance and VR for training simulations.

Since its inception, Trimensions has been focused on bringing exciting new technologies into the reach of the common Indian citizen and hence emphasises on good, clear design and user experience. Offering a large variety of end-to-end services including graphic and web design, Trimensions aim to change user’s perception of reality.

WOWSOME

One of the fastest growing Indian start-up in the field of Augmented Reality, WOWSOME was founded in 2015, by Vishal Reddy and Karan Bhangay. It is one of the selected portfolio company headquartered at T-Hub Hyderabad. With a growing portfolio of around 50 brands and several major publishers, they obsessively research to discover new applications for AR that will merge advertising and entertainment.

Their expertise lies in dynamic development of relevant media using Computer Vision. WOWSOME adds real time, situation based, interactive, visually stunning, and virtually unlimited digital content to environment around you by extending it to your smartphone and tablet. It works in harmony with the real world and enhances the real life experience with relevant information.

Xenium

Xenium has been developing Virtual Reality solutions from last two years and they believe that VR empowers businesses with new visualization techniques, developers with fresh creative potential, and researchers with tools that accelerate scientific discovery. They started doing virtual reality when wireless Headgears like Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR were not available in the Market.

It offers a full range of products and support including the complete VR systems, custom solution design, and application development. Their virtual reality solutions are helping both enterprises and in academics by enabling innovation and enhanced communication.

Xenium is the fourth company in the world & first in India to have done a live streaming using Virtual Reality. The real-time broadcast was captured through 8 vantage points (i.e. 8 units of 360 Live Shooting Camera) and streaming done over a 10 MBS line on the Telecom Network, proving the robustness and reliability of the Telecom Network at large.

Conclusion:

While there has been a lot of buzz across Silicon Valley with the VR, India is still taking its baby steps towards this sector. According to a report by Goldman Sachs published earlier this year, the combined virtual reality and augmented reality market is estimated to reach anywhere from $80B to $182B in market size, by 2025. And with the investors, innovators and those who truly understand the DNA of VR rolling high, it is quite likely that 2016 would be the year of opportunity for VR segment in India.

The post 10 startups that are changing the face of Virtual Reality in India appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

AI assisted modern apps have become an integral part of our everyday life.  As if the technology in various other forms had not made us enough lazy that artificial intelligence is evolving to corrupt us further. Sit back and give your fingers that moment of relaxation. Just speak about what you want. Fair enough? Well, that’s what the generations coming along are getting used to (well, that includes me too). Whether its iPhone or android or a Microsoft driven system, there is no place that is untouched with AI.

While Apple’s Siri has been conversing with us, staging desired results, searching the restaurants for us or band shows in the city or giving us weather predictions, it appears that there are many others in the town to give fierce competition to this favourite AI app of many.

With Google Now, Cortana, Hound, Dragon Go and many more, the market is flooding with AI and machine learning driven apps and given the largest and oldest market presence by Siri, we often tend to see it as Siri vs. everything else. Personally having fallen for the capabilities that Siri holds, I thought of making a comparative analysis of Siri with various similar or remotely similar machine-talking-things. Let’s read out what I found.

With no intention of showing a high to one over others, in the comparisons made I have tried to stick to points such as the app’s functionalities, customer reach, privacy and security among others.

With a huge list to lay a ground for the battle of AI based app, there could be various other domains to be compared- customer reach being an important one. Let’s see how these apps are being utilized by the users. According to a study, only up to 70% of iPhone users use Siri on a regular basis and 2% of American iPhone users have never used it. Talking about Google, which is available in both ioS and Android, it fetches more users than anyone else. With the numbers reaching to more than 1 billion active users, the customer reach of Google Now is ought to be really high. Microsoft Cortana prides over 1 billion question since making her debut while Amazon Echo touched 3-million-unit sale by April 2016. The numbers for others seem to be highly impressive too indicating both the dependency of users on such AI based apps and its popularity. Offering a wide range of features and amidst the cut throat competition, it surely is a herculean task to declare a clear winner as each of them gives some reason to favour it over others!

The post Battle of AI: Siri vs. everyone else appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Over the last few years, analytics has rapidly gained importance and there is hardly any industry that analytics has not touched upon. Analytics is being used everywhere from Banking to Information Technology to Film-making.

Hence, as a part of our annual exercise, we have undertaken to conduct ‘Analytics India Industry Study 2016’ with the aim to know where the analytics industry stands as of today and what lies in ahead for the industry. The study was conducted over a period of one month and by collecting data from both primary and secondary sources. Further an in-depth analysis of data was carried out to understand the size of the industry, its biggest revenue contributors and the size & demographics of analytics professionals in India.

Analytics India Industry Study 2015

Analytics India Industry Study 2013

Analytics India Industry Study 2012

Industry Size

• Analytics Market in India currently stands at $1.64 Billion annually in revenues, growing at a healthy rate of 28.8% CAGR.
  • Though analytics is still largely considered a part of broader KPO industry, increasingly analytics is now being considered a separate industry of its own. This is evident from the rise of many startups in analytics and data science space creating a niche of their own.
  • Moreover, numerous sub industries are mushrooming around analytics, most prominent being artificial intelligence.

Sector Type

• In terms of Sector type, Finance & Banking form the largest sector being served by analytics in India. Of the total revenue earned by analytics industry in India, 35% or $575 Million comes from Finance & Banking.
• Marketing comes second at 25%, followed by E-commerce sector at 17% of analytics revenues in India.

Domain in Analytics

• Almost 70% of all analytics related work done in India is in the space of BI/ Reporting/ Dashboard or analytics code deployment & maintenance.
• Just 7% of analytics is in advanced model building and prediction.
• 22% of analytics professionals are involved in Big Data Management.

Analytics Industry by Cities

• 29% or $472 Million in market size for analytics industry comes from Delhi/ NCR. This is followed by Bengaluru at 26%.
• We earlier reported that Bengaluru is the biggest city in terms of number of analytics companies in India. Yet, Bengaluru lags behind Delhi/ NCR in terms of relative market sizes.

Analytics Professionals in India

• The average work experience of analytics professionals in India is 7.2 years.
• Around 8,500 freshers were added to analytics workforce in India last year.
• Almost 46% analytics professionals in India have a work experience less than 5 years.
• Around 19% of analytics professionals are at senior positions (Director, VP, Founders).
• 56% of analytics professionals have a Master’s/ Post Graduation degree.
• Only 3% of analytics professionals in India hold a PhD or Doctorate degree.
• Women participation in analytics workforce is low – just 23% of analytics professionals in India are women.

Analytics Industry as a whole is growing rapidly at 28.8% CAGR and almost 80% of its revenue comes from 3 sectors i.e. Finance and Banking, Marketing, and E-commerce. As these sectors grow, the need for analytics by them will also increase thereby contributing to the overall growth of analytics industry.

At present most of the analytics related work is in the space of BI/ Reporting/ Dashboard and areas like advanced analytics and big data are yet under-tapped, representing so much scope for the industry to grow in these areas. Also from the data of analytic professionals in India, it is clearly evident that in order to support the growth of the industry, more skilled professionals are required and especially at the senior levels.

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In the past few years, the research in the field of analytics/ big data has piled up and has led to an exponential increase in newer publications and research papers. And if your aim is to stay at par with the latest happenings and a step ahead of your peers, it becomes inevitable to go through these pieces. But how? Given academic research is not well publicized, it might still be tricky to find which are the ones essential for you? Which ones should you read to be aptly relevant for your area of interest? How to dig into the pool of those hundreds of thousands of resources? Well, many of you must have come across these doubts and we are here to offer 10 most essential academic journals one must definitely have access to if he/she is a data scientist.

Given academic research is not well publicized, it might still be tricky to find which are the ones essential for you? Which ones should you read to be aptly relevant for your area of interest? How to dig into the pool of those hundreds of thousands of resources? Well, many of you must have come across these doubts and we are here to offer 10 most essential academic journals one must definitely have access to if he/she is a data scientist.

PS: We have compiled this list based on a combination of factors including Impact factor of the journal, how relevant, active & up to date the journals are for a data scientist.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, which commenced publication in 1970, is now the generally accepted premier international forum for the publication of results of current research in this field. The journal welcomes foundational and applied papers describing mature work involving computational accounts of aspects of intelligence.

Big Data

Big Data, a highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal, provides a unique forum for world-class research exploring the challenges and opportunities in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating vast amounts of data, including data science, big data infrastructure and analytics, and pervasive computing.

The Journal addresses questions surrounding this powerful and growing field of data science and facilitates the efforts of researchers, business managers, analysts, developers, data scientists, physicists, statisticians, infrastructure developers, academics, and policymakers to improve operations, profitability, and communications within their businesses and institutions.

Spanning a broad array of disciplines focusing on novel big data technologies, policies, and innovations, the Journal brings together the community to address current challenges and enforce effective efforts to organize, store, disseminate, protect, manipulate, and, most importantly, find the most effective strategies to make this incredible amount of information work to benefit society, industry, academia, and government.

Big Data Research

The journal aims to promote and communicate advances in big data research by providing a fast and high quality forum for researchers, practitioners and policy makers from the very many different communities working on, and with, this topic.

The journal will accept papers on foundational aspects in dealing with big data, as well as papers on specific Platforms and Technologies used to deal with big data. To promote Data Science and interdisciplinary collaboration between fields, and to showcase the benefits of data driven research, papers demonstrating applications of big data in domains as diverse as Geoscience, Social Web, Finance, e-Commerce, Health Care, Environment and Climate, Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry, life sciences and drug discovery, digital libraries and scientific publications, security and government will also be considered. Occasionally the journal may publish whitepapers on policies, standards and best practices.

Computational Statistics & Data Analysis by International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC)

Computational Statistics & Data Analysis (CSDA), the official journal of the International Association of Statistical Computing (IASC), is an international journal dedicated to the dissemination of methodological research and applications in the areas of computational statistics and data analysis.

Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning

Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning publishes high-quality survey and tutorial monographs of the field using modern techniques to enable both instant linking to the primary research in its electronic form and affordable paper copies, finally delivering on the promise to authors of multiple channel publishing from a single source.

Each issue of Foundations and Trends ® in Machine Learning comprises a 50-100 page monograph written by research leaders in the field. Monographs that give tutorial coverage of subjects, research retrospectives as well as survey papers that offer state-of-the-art reviews fall within the scope of the journal.

International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining

IJBIDM provides a forum for state-of-the-art developments and research as well as current innovative activities in business intelligence, data analysis and mining. Intelligent data analysis provides powerful and effective tools for problem solving in a variety of business modelling tasks. IJBIDM highlights intelligent techniques used for business modelling, including all areas of data visualisation, data pre-processing (fusion, editing, transformation, filtering, sampling), data engineering, data mining techniques, tools and applications, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, fuzzy techniques, expert systems, knowledge filtering, and post-processing.

International Journal of Data Science and Analytics

Data-driven scientific discovery is a key emerging paradigm driving research innovation and industrial development in domains such as business, social sci­ence, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. The field encompasses the larger ar­eas of data analytics, machine learning, and managing big data, while related new sci­entific chal­lenges range from data capture, creation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and vis­ualization, to integration across heterogeneous, interdependent complex resources for real-time decision-making, collaboration, and value creation. The journal welcomes experimental and theoretical findings on data science and advanced analytics along with their applications to real-life situations.

Journal of Big Data

Journal of Big Data publishes high-quality, scholarly research papers, methodologies and case studies covering a broad range of topics, from big data analytics to data-intensive computing and all applications of big data research. The journal examines the challenges facing big data today and going forward including, but not limited to: data capture and storage; search, sharing, and analytics; big data technologies; data visualization; architectures for massively parallel processing; data mining tools and techniques; machine learning algorithms for big data; cloud computing platforms; distributed file systems and databases; and scalable storage systems. Academic researchers and practitioners will find the Journal of Big Data to be the definitive, most comprehensive reference in the field.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is an international forum for research on computational approaches to learning. The journal publishes articles reporting substantive results on a wide range of learning methods applied to a variety of learning problems.

The journal features papers that describe research on problems and methods, applications research, and issues of research methodology. Papers making claims about learning problems or methods provide solid support via empirical studies, theoretical analysis, or comparison to psychological phenomena. Applications papers show how to apply learning methods to solve important applications problems. Research methodology papers improve how machine learning research is conducted.

All papers describe the supporting evidence in ways that can be verified or replicated by other researchers. The papers also detail the learning component clearly and discuss assumptions regarding knowledge representation and the performance task.

Sigkdd Explorations

SIGKDD’s mission to provide the premier forum for advancement, education, and adoption of the “science” of knowledge discovery and data mining from all types of data stored in computers and networks of computers.

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When we talk about statistics and related field, we come across various important theoretical and practical implications in the field being widely used. And we often wonder where they came from? Who brought statistics to a stage that we see today?

Here we bring the 10 greatest statistics giants of all times from India (listed in alphabetical order), who have brought statistics to a stage where we see it today. To give a treat to your knowledge and bring inspiration to the table, read as below:

C. R. Rao: (1920-Present)

Currently serving as the Professor Emeritus at Penn State University &Research Professor at the University at Buffalo, he has various honours and accolades under his belt. Being described as a living legend by the American Statistical Association, his work has influenced not just statistics but various other fields like economics, genetics, demography, biometry, medicine and more.

After having completed M.A in mathematics at the Andhra University, he did his M.A in statistics from Calcutta University. He worked at the Indian Statistical Institute for 40 years after which he moved to USA to take teaching at University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University.

Having worked in the area of multivariate analysis, combinatorial design, statistical genetics, statistical inference and linear models, he is a big inspiration for those planning to dive into the field of statistics.

Debabrata Basu: (1924-2001)

A key contributor to the foundations of statistics, Debabrata Basu was India’s leading mathematician and statistician. Working in the direction of development of survey sampling, his theories formed a strong basis of a complete sufficient statistic.

As a part of his association with the Indian Statistical Institute and Florida State University, he invented simple examples to deal with the complexities of statistics. Born to a mathematician father specialising in number theory, Basu studied mathematics at Dacca University, now in Bangladesh.

Opting a course in Statistics as a part of the undergraduate honours programme, he joined the Indian Statistical Institute as a research scholar under C.R. Rao. His work was greatly influenced by Abraham Wald, who had developed a decision-theoretic foundation for statistics in which Bayesian statistics was a central part. Being an ardent Bayesian, many of his foundation papers, pointed out the deficiencies in Neyman–Pearsonian and the Fisherian methods.

Jayanta Kumar Ghosh: (1937-Present)

With a B.S from Presidency College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta, his educational qualifications also include an M.A and Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta. He currently serves at the Emeritus Professor at Indian Statistical Institute and Professor of statistics at Purdue University, US.

His most famous works include “Bahadur–Ghosh–Kiefer representation” along with R. R. Bahadur & Jack Kiefer and the “Ghosh–Pratt identity” researched along with John W. Pratt. A pioneer in the field of statistical genetics, survival analysis, asymptotics, high dimensional data analysis, modeling and model selection, he started his research career in the early 1960s.

With various accolades under his name, he has also been felicitated with Padma Shri in 2014 for his excellence in the field of Science and Engineering.

Kantilal Mardia: (1935-Present)

Specializing in directional statistics, multivariate analysis, geostatistics, statistical bioinformatics and statistical shape analysis, he gained popularity with a series of tests of multivariate normality based measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis. His work on statistical measures of shape is quite famous too.

To raise the standards of Statistics at a global level, he has initiated exchange programs between Leeds and other centres across the globe such as the University of Granada, Spain and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta.

He has also penned down several books and conference proceedings.

K. C. Sreedharan Pillai: (1920–1985)

He is famous for his work on multivariate analysis and probability distribution and was the best known statisticians of his time. Having studied at the University of Travancore in Trivandrum, he graduated in 1941 followed by Master’s Degree in 1945.

After having a stint at teaching in University of Kerala, he went to US and obtained his PhD in statistics from the University of North Carolina in 1954.

He was the founder of the Statistical Centre at the University of the Philippines and a visiting Professor & Advisor for a long duration there. In 1962 he was appointed Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Purdue University and has been honoured with prestigious titles such as Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute to name a few.

Pranab K. Sen: (1937-Present)

With a physician grandfather, he initially had an inclination towards studying medicine and began his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, only to opt for B.S due to his young age. It was followed by M.Sc. in 1957 and a Ph.D. in 1962.

His most famous works include invention of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator independently and along with Hodges and Lehmann. He has also authored & co-authored various books on non-parametric statistics. He has been the joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference and was also the founding co-editor of journals, Sequential Analysis and Statistics and Decisions.

He has taught at University of Calcutta, University of California and University of North Carolina.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: (1893 – 1972)

The man behind National Statistics Day celebration, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis has an interesting history of how he got introduced to the field of statistics. A pioneer in statistical field in India, he is best remembered for his work on anthropometry, measurement of human individual and for introducing Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure.

Back in 1913 when he was set to study B.Sc. at the University of London, destiny took him to Cambridge and ended up completing graduation at King’s College. Being introduced to the world of Biometrika, he got fascinated by it deeply which led him to explore statistics with much detail.

As a founder of the Indian Statistical Institute, he contributed to the design of large-scale sample surveys and introduced the concept of pilot surveys.

His variant of Wassily Leontief’s Input-output model, the Mahalanobis model, intended towards rapid industrialisation of India was adopted in the Second Five Year Plan.

Raghu Raj Bahadur: (1924 –1997)

Considered to be the architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics, Raghu Raj Bahadur was born in Delhi and received his BA and MA in mathematics from University of Delhi which was followed by doctorate from the University of North Carolina.

Having worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta from 1956 to 1961, he spent the rest of his academic career in the University of Chicago. He has also been the President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1974-75 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.

Amongst his best known work are “Bahadur Efficiency” and the Bahadur-Ghosh-Kiefer representation with J. K. Ghosh and Jack Kiefer. Along with Theodore Wilbur Anderson he has framed the Anderson–Bahadur algorithm.  It is a key in the field of statistics and engineering for solving binary classification problems.

Raj Chandra Bose: (1901 –1987)

Best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting codes, Bose was an Indian American mathematician and statistician. BCH codes, a part of the theory of error-correcting codes fetches the acronym from the inventors Alexis Hocquenghem, Raj Bose and D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri.

Despite facing serious personal crisis, Bose continued his studies and pursued M.A. in pure mathematics at the University of Calcutta. During his entire course of research, he has explored the notions of partial geometry, strongly regular graph, and started a systematic study of difference sets to construct symmetric block designs.

He was appointed the Director of Indian Statistical Institute by P. C. Mahalanobis in 1931, following which he joined the University of Calcutta in 1940 where he taught the likes of C. R. Rao and H. K. Nandi.

Samarendra Nath Roy: (1906 –1964)

Born to a freedom fighter father, SN Roy is a well renowned name in the field of statistics. He was one of the early students of Mahalanobis and formed an active group of statisticians under his guidance.

His work on multivariate statistical analysis, mainly that of the Jacobians of complicated transformations for various exact distributions, rectangular coordinates and the Bartlett decomposition fetched him the most popularity in the field.

The educational qualifications enlist BSc Mathematics (Honours) from Presidency College followed by MSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Calcutta.

After a stint as a visiting professor at Columbia University and University of North Carolina, he returned to India and became Head of Department of Statistics at the University of Calcutta. But he took back to US where he took up teaching as a full time profession.

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For organizations today, the most important asset is ‘Data’. And in order to be successful and be ahead in the race of getting customers and market shares, it is important for them to not just  collect this data but also analyze it to use for business decisions and innovations.

But how does an organization achieve all this and with ease. Well the answer is ‘Big data Platform’. Big data platforms help store, manage and analyse big data to achieve required business outcomes.

But with so many big data platforms being available today, which is the right one for your business, which platform meets your needs is a question. So we compiled a list of ‘ 10 Leading Big Data Platforms’ and what they have to offer you. While there are dozens of big data platforms that have propped up over the last few years, we created this list based on their relative popularity right now, collected through mediums like Google insights.

Cloudera Enterprise

Cloudera Enterprise is a high performance low cost platform for conducting analytics on data. Cloudera Enterprise has the only native Hadoop Search engine and this platform provides its users with active data optimization feature. Cloudera manager includes advanced features like intelligent configuration defaults, customized monitoring, and robust troubleshooting which allow easy administration of Hadoop in any environment. With predictive maintenance included in its Support Data Hub, Cloudera Enterprise keeps you up and running.

HPE Vertica

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s big data platform Vertica is one of the most advanced SQL database analytics portfolio to address today’s demanding big data analytics initiatives. It allows companies to manage and analyse massive volumes of structured and semi-structured data quickly and reliably with no limits. Vertica allows organizations to leverage on analytics by providing support for all leading BI and visualization tools, open source technologies like Hadoop and R, and built-in analytical functions.

Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP)

HDP is a secure and enterprise-ready open source Apache Hadoop distribution. It is based on a centralized architecture YARN. This big data platform takes care of the entire data need i.e. it addresses data-at-rest, powers real-time customer applications and delivers robust analytics to help organizations in decision making. YARN and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) are the two pillars of HDP.

IBM Big data Platform

IBM’s big data platform caters to the full spectrum of big data business challenges allowing its users to have an integrated experience. This platform is a blend of traditional technologies and modern new technologies. It combines the traditional technologies which are best suited for structured, repeatable tasks along with new technologies which provide speed and flexibility and are ideal for adhoc data exploration, discovery and unstructured analysis. Hadoop-based analytics, stream computing, data warehousing, and information integration & governance are four core capabilities of IBM Big data Platform.

Kognitio Analytical platform

The Kognitio Analytical Platform is best suited to run complex analytics on big data. It is designed to cater to organization with more users having more complex queries and requiring a shorter response time. This analytics platform provides ultra-fast high-concurrency SQL for Hadoop platforms and also for existing data warehouse implementations. It seamlessly interoperates with the user’s existing BI, analytics and visualisation applications, and Hadoop big data storage.

MapR Converged Data Platform

MapR Converged Data Platform is one single platform for big data applications. Organizations using MapR’s platform do not require to move data to specialized silos for processing as data can be processed in place. MapR’s Platform is based on the concept of  Polyglot Persistence which allows to leverage multiple data types and formats directly. MapR, a converged data platform integrates the power of Hadoop and Spark with global event streaming, real-time database capabilities, and enterprise storage, thereby enabling its users to experience the enormous power of data.

Pivotal Big Data Suite

Pivotal Big Data Suite aims at being a database technology which helps organizations accelerate their digital transformation. Pivotal Big Data Suite is based on open source technologies. This big data platform aims to provide a wide and comprehensive base for modern data architectures. Pivotal Big Data Suite can not only be deployed on-premise but also in public clouds. It contains all the elements necessary for batch and streaming analytics architectures.

Qubole Data Service

Qubole Data Service (QDS) aims at making the platform more accessible to carry out big data analytics for data stored in the cloud accounts of AWS, Google and Microsoft. QDS is an integrated interface which is used to perform ad hoc analysis, predictive analysis, machine learning, streaming for data driven organizations. Also QDS’s workbench feature allows users who do not have knowledge of writing SQL query to query using SmartQuery interface. QDS Data Engines are fully automated and optimized for the cloud.

SAP HANA

SAP’s big data platform HANA is designed for next-generation applications and analytics. It is an in-memory platform which focuses on running the analytics applications in a smarter way, making business processes faster and creating simpler data infrastructures. It acts as the foundation for all data needs by allowing to integrate all types of data and using advanced analytical processing for deeper insights.

Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform

The Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform lets its user offload the data and workloads from Teradata IDW to a low-cost system of Teradata. All this can be done without disturbing the execution of Teradata analytics that the user wishes to carry out. This feature of Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform helps you avoid the complexity of adding Hadoop for low-cost storage. Also this integrated big data platform boasts of having global hot spare drives, an optional hot standby node, and redundant power supplies for enhanced system availability.

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Artificial Intelligence has been there decades ago, but off late this field has caught pace and has been growing rapidly. Almost every organization, whether in the field of retail or fashion or education or banking is trying to use artificial intelligence in a way possible to innovate and make their services user-friendly to provide convenience to their customers. AI is becoming the new face of doing business. For instance, human interaction with customers are now being replaced by chat bots.

This need for artificial intelligence by so many industries has created an environment for startups to flourish in the areas of artificial intelligence. Also the world’s largest tech companies are funding start-ups in this space fueling their growth.

Analytics India Magazine presents you a list of ‘Top 10 Artificial Intelligence Start-ups’ and how each one of them is positioned differently catering to a niche area of artificial intelligence.

The list of companies presented below is in alphabetic order.

AIndra Systems

AIndra Systems, incorporated in 2012, is an Artificial Intelligence based technology start-up. It is  into creating Computer Vision and Machine Learning based products that addresses the problems of a huge magnitude in our society. With its patent-pending Face-Recognition (FR) technology powering AIndra’s smartphone based product, ‘SmartAttendance Enterprise ™’, it is able to deliver solutions to improve and enhance governance and productivity of various programs delivered on-the-field, for example: services like Skill training, healthcare -service delivery, financial-services, etc. in diverse remote locations.

“Drishti” AIndra’s FR platform works with smartphones, laptops, desktops-with-webcam, IP-camera, tablets, etc. to authenticate the expected users/beneficiaries who are receiving certain services and verify the individual against his/her Government issued ID cards like Aadhaar Card. The SmartAttendance Enterprise(tm) works even without real-time internet connectivity using the ‘Store-and-Forward’ mechanism.In Healthcare, AIndra is building an affordable Cervical Cancer screening Device with Point-of-sample collection, using their expertise in Computer Vision and Machine Learning.

Brainasoft

Brainasoft is into development of distinct and innovative AI products. Their areas of interest for software development include conversational bots, speech recognition, machine learning and human-computer interfaces. Brainasoft’s flagship product i.e. Braina AI assistant is a leading intelligent digital assistant software for Windows PC. Braina is used by more than 2,00,000 individuals and businesses in more than 180 countries.

Some features of Braina include speech to text dictation in third party software, play songs and videos stored locally and on online platforms such as SoundCloud and YouTube, bring up weather information, Control PC through Android device, show news on a specific topic, learn facts from conversation and recall it when asked.

Brainasoft is soon planning to launch another innovative product like Inforobo . Inforobo will allow users to create their own AI virtual assistants and chatbot easily. Inforobo can be used for wide range of applications including customer service, device control and automation, IOT, live chat, information retrieval, website assistance etc.

Fluid AI

Fluid AI, an artificial intelligence startup, was started by brothers Raghav Aggarwal and Abhinav Aggarwal who dropped out of IIM Ahmedabad and ISB respectively to start Fluid AI.

The company’s Artificial Intelligence is working in two areas .The first area is AI solutions on top of data which are able to make massively accurate predictions and take action on the same. This is helping clients undertake solutions like predicting what is the next best product to upsell a customer , what’s the likelihood for a bank customer defaulting on a loan, or preventing fraud from a million transactions.

Their solution in the area of customer experience is changing the retail experience of a customer walking into a shop, bank branch or hotel lobby where they are greeted by an AI assistant smart screen. This is fundamentally changing the in-store experience allowing customers to directly interact with AI in an augmented reality environment.

Mad Street Den

Mad Street Den, headquartered in Chennai and California, is a computer vision-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup that’s reimagining the future of retail. The company’s first retail vertical Vue.ai is increasing business efficiencies and making shopping easier for consumers around the world.

With its team of deep tech engineers and retail experts, Mad Street Den is teaching machines to see and understand the world around them. Its technology identifies objects, people, and style preferences like colour, pattern, and texture to learn customer likes and dislikes. This personalized customer experience drives product discovery and conversions for marketplaces, brands, and online retailers around the world.

Vue.ai_Visually Similar Recommendations GIF

Morph.ai

Morph.ai is an AI powered B2B platform where businesses can build their own conversational services and deploy them over channels like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, SMS, live-chat, in-app chat etc.

Morph.ai is building a platform that caters to all the needs of bot makers. They have pre-trained models for common use cases, reusable templates, intelligent learning from previous mistakes, storyboard to create conversation flows, integrations with multiple channels, integrations with various CRMs, dashboard for human agents to chat when AI fails.

In the consumer world, messaging is taking over the world like apps did a decade ago, presenting a huge opportunity for businesses to sell their products and services on messaging platform. Morph.ai helps business to follow the mantra ”be where your users are”. The users don’t need to have the compulsion of installing an app to be able to use the company’s services. They can buy the stuff right where they discover it. Conversational commerce removes the burden from customers and businesses and makes everything easier.

Niki.ai

Niki is an AI ­powered bot , which helps you complete online purchases on all your necessary services through a simple chat interface. This eliminates the need to install multiple apps and lets you make end­ to ­end bookings on a single app. You are guided along with personalised recommendations about the service that suits you best.

Niki, backed by Ratan Tata, aspires to be a one stop destination for all your online purchasing. With a user base of over 70,000, Niki resides in Android as an App offering various services like Mobile Recharge, Utility bill payments, Cab & Bus booking, Food Ordering (Burger King) and Laundry services. Going Forward, Niki plans to be an independent platform, plugged and used on any interface, whether iOS, Messaging, Mobile OS, Wearables or otherwise.

SigTuple

SigTuple, founded by Apurv Anand, Rohit Kumar Pandey and Tathagato Rai Dastidar in 2015, uses the power of Artificial Intelligence to make Healthcare Diagnostic better. SigTuple applies the latest advances in artificial intelligence towards solving the healthcare diagnosis problem. They build algorithms which learn from medical data, and help doctors by automating disease screening and diagnosis. They enable access to these algorithms through low cost diagnostic devices and a cloud based intelligent platform.

The company’s initial focus is on medical image analysis – pathology, radiology, ophthalmology – for detection of diseases and abnormalities. Their products aim to automate the manual inspection of visual data for diagnosis. This will help in improved accuracy of diagnosis by making the diagnosis process objective and standardised. Also help improve healthcare delivery by making advanced diagnostics available through low cost medical devices.

SigTuple’s product Shonit (the complete peripheral blood smear analysis solution, which automates manual microscopic review of blood) is in beta usage now. Other products are in the development stage.

Skedool

Skedool.it, co­-founded by Naveen Varma and Deepti Yenireddy in 2015, was started with the aim to automate repetitive everyday tasks for business executives, sales and recruiting professionals. As part of this initiative, Skedool has developed Skedool’ s assistant as a blend of Artificial and Human Intelligence that quickly and accurately handles all your B2B scheduling and calendar management needs for less than 5% of the cost of a full time executive assistant. In addition to saving time, Skedool’ s quick response time increases the conversion rate from initial outreach to getting a meeting scheduled by 40%. The company currently serves hundreds of customers including Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Boomerang Commerce.

Skedool.it uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning supervised by humans to enable customers to communicate with the service via e­mail just as they would with a human executive assistant sitting outside their office. Skedool.it is currently available for Gmail and Outlook365 and integrates with leading CRM, marketing and recruiting tools.

Staqu Technologies

Staqu Technologies Private Limited is an artificial intelligence based startup that is solving the problem of cross channel product discovery in e-commerce through the amalgamation of user experience led research and contextual research. Staqu’s products are completely research oriented and are based on deep learning, Staqu’s product suite takes it a level further by using deep learning based technologies to solve existential problems customized and catering to the needs of the Indian consumers – companies and users alike.

The VGrep Suite, Staqu’s flagship product suite, comprises of Visual Search, Similar Products Recommendations, Automated Attribute Generation, Fashion Trend Analysis, and Complete Look Recommendation.  VGrep’s Visual Search technology is a “user centric” API that can be integrated into the search engine of e-commerce companies, that lets users search for unstructured products in the e-commerce market simply by taking an image and searching for it.

vPhrase

vPhrase helps companies communicate insights in their data, in words, using AI. The company’s patent pending platform, Phrazor, analyses data, derives insights and then communicates those insights, in words, in multiple languages. It automates the work of analysis and communication which is the forte of expensive domain experts and it does this at a fraction of their cost. The insights and nuances that one can explain via words cannot be explained using charts and tables alone.

vPhrase helps its clients make their internal reports easier to understand for their employees. It does that by writing personalised narratives for each employee highlighting all the important points which need attention. With vPhrase’s narrative based reports, employees spend less time on understanding what has happened and more time on taking actions.

vPhrase has won the ‘Economic Times Power Of Ideas’ contest where 19000 teams from across the country participated.

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