 "Data access and use of analytics increase sales success")
With online retailing taking the centre stage of commercial activities in India, Chennai-based cloud-based product intelligence company, Indix, looks to become the all-in-one database for all products sold online. The product intelligence platform helps brands and retailers in gathering, organizing, and analyzing product-related information, visualizing key insights, and enabling decisions based on real-time information.
The company was co-founded in January 2012 in Chennai by former Microsoft executive Sanjay Parthasarathy along with Sridhar Venkatesh, Rajesh Muppalla and Satya Kaliki.
Indix's solution helps retailers to track prices and build a database for products sold online. It works on subscription model and sells products through APIs.
There are a whole set of companies that have come about to monetise the content on products. “When we look at product information, we also have something which is called
offers' information that involves the different platforms and prices that the product is being sold. Hence, we provide information around the whole lifecycle of a product,"
said Venkatesh, who is also the vice-president of product management and business development. He likes calling Indix "the Google Maps of online product information".
Such a database can be of multiple uses. For retailers, it's about deriving analytics for their business to figure about the pricing and assortment that needs to be kept in mind.
For instance, often brands are not even aware about the selling prices of their products on various e-commerce platforms. While some firms do have a product intelligence unit, most of these units fail when it comes to deriving information from competitor's products.
Another use-case scenario is in the storage of structured information. For instance, when it comes to delivery of online products, a logistics player would find it difficult to manage the huge amount of repeated or overlapping product information coming from various online selling platforms. Often, such logistics players end up storing huge amount of repeated data on the same product.
“There is no one place out there that's an authoritative single platform for all the products sold online. Our solution strives to bring out a clean structure to save product information and increase efficiency," claims Venkatesh.
Currently, the company has a client list majorly from the US that includes Microsoft and a few Fortune 500 companies. The company is increasing its focus on the India market and is looking at Australia, too. The company is in talks with various Indian players including Delhivery.
The company has raised about $30 million in various rounds from investors like Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), Nexus Venture Partners and Avalon Ventures.
With a current database of 900 million products, Indix looks at a combined global market size of $100 billion because it is an aggregation of different spaces. While market researcher Nielsen could be counted as a competitor, Indix, on the other hand can add value to the former by getting product information from the online space. According to Indix, there are about one to two billion products in the US alone, apart from similar numbers worldwide.
