iKen Intelligence Personalized

Date:   Thursday , May 06, 2010

Seeing the huge market potential for intelligent business systems, Dr. Rajendra Sonar, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Siddharth Goel, a serial entrepreneur, have built a novel approach by collaborating BI 2.0 and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to offer analytics and business insights to the granularity level of N=1. iKen, an IIT Bombay research spin-off, has a vision to provide highly relevant and extremely personalized end user experiences.

“Mooga is an Intelligent Consumer Analytics Software Platform backed by Hybrid AI techniques such as expert system, case-based reasoning, neural networks and genetic algorithms,” informs Siddharth Goel, CEO of the company. Today, the Mumbai headquartered company founded in July 2008 has its office in Argentina as well and a decent clientele in Latin America.

The idea behind founding iKen was to offer Personalized Analytics on an N=1 basis, which could be applied to verticals such as Telecom, Mobile VAS, Internet, Customer Lifecycle Management, Customer Care, BFSI, Billing, ERP/CRM and Independent Software Vendors having respective Domain Expertise; in areas such as Personalization and Recommendation, Intelligent Campaign Management and Advertisements, Usage and Retention, Prepaid Lifecycle Management, Credit rating and Transaction Monitoring, etc.

Conventional Business Intelligence (BI) systems classify or compartmentalize customers into groups, adopt a top-down approach where huge amount of data is crunched, patterns are derived and focus is on a macro level by “generalization”. They lack understanding each customer “distinctly” to the granularity level of N=1 which can enable “actionable” steps well before a customer is lost. Explains Goel, “Mooga adopts a bottom-up approach where the behavior of one customer is analyzed at a time and individual learning can be summarized to get group, application, functional or organizational level insights. Unlike conventional BI, where Analytics and other systems such as Operational are treated differently, Mooga’s N=1 analytics is deeply integrated into operational systems and enterprise databases such that Intelligence is provided at an enterprise level and can be part and parcel of every business process rather than being focused on select functional areas such as CRM (as happens in conventional BI approach).”

Iken has been pretty successful in acquiring few top-notch customers. For instance, TCS is taking Mooga globally to cater to the increasing demand for Personalization to the various industry verticals mentioned above. Claro (part of America Movil-world’s fourth largest telecom operator), after integrating Mooga, has increased its number of downloads on their WAP portal by 40 percent within three months. Simato Solutions has taken iKen to the Sri Lankan telecom market where two of the biggest operators are its clients now. Hungama, Sony Music, MTV and Motorola are few other clients with iKen. “We make money via license fee model which could be transactional or monthly,”informs Goel.

Since the inception the company has been growing remarkably. It grew by over 400 percent last year and through their recent partnerships with companies such as TCS, Comviva and What’s On India, the company believes that there is a potential for an explosive growth in this year. “The journey has been challenging, at times demanding but satisfying in the end. We are poised to bring about a paradigm shift in the way market treats customers today.iKen is confident of taking Mooga from present day “great to have” technology to a “must have” system feature in the following years,” concludes Goel.