An exclusive interview with IT Voice, Mr. Dinesh Gupta, Managing Director, BUSY Infotech Pvt. Ltd. during his business trip to Jaipur, Rajasthan.
Megha Mary- With your experience of managing an IT business for 27 years, where do you think the IT industry has headed?
Mr. Dinesh Gupta- IT from inception itself was bound to expand. It is the backbone of every business in India. The time we joined the Accounting software segment of the IT industry, we were only a small organization then, but gradually IT increased its hold on every segment of the market. IT gradually has become a basic need of any industry.
Megha Mary-BUSY Infotech Pvt. Ltd. was a sister concern of Digitronics Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd. How did BUSY start?
Mr. Dinesh Gupta- The first venture that I entered into was an IT services company, with which we used to provide hardware maintenance service and custom software development services, with the capital limitations initially. We gradually expanded to the hardware sales business. Then for a year after being into custom software business, we had a feeling and an inner calling that we were not meant for custom software but we meant for software product. We did 5-6 projects of custom software but after that we worked on the development of our very own custom software. And when the software was initially in the state of development, there were many offers by big software companies buy our product, but it was our belief and confidence in our product that we refused to those offers and skipped each hurdle and built what and where we are today.
Megha Mary-How does BUSY cater to needs of the startups as well as to the needs of the mid sized organizations at the same time?
Mr. Dinesh Gupta- Basically there are three categories of product. One category is basic business management software like BUSY, Tally etc, then comes the mid range products like Microsoft dynamite. And then we have the high end products like SAP, oracle. We fall to the very basic category of the business accounting software. We are attending to the business needs of startups to them transforming to mid-sized organizations. The products that were already in the business accounting software before us set the trend of providing the accounting needs in a very affordable and reachable fashion, so we had to follow the trend, which helped us succeed and dodge the difficulties we would have faced while establishment of the product.
Also, we are able to work out the economy because of the very big market size available in India, and the demands arising are leading to sales of the product in big numbers and in big masses. Our SEM segment is very big. We are able to make our product reachable and the affordable due to the positive equilibrium between the demand and supply. The affordability is because of the scale. But the innovation we have brought about is unlike other software products we offer Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and the Basic Edition. So after a long research, we came up with variety of products to offer to so that according to their needs the user surf through different products. And in accordance to the growing needs they can upgrade with the up gradation being seamless and the user doesn’t have to redo anything.
So a complete package has been developed with a lot of research that the product offers everything to startup and with the growing needs can upgrade.
Megha Mary-What impact did the demonetization had on the software business?
Mr. Dinesh Gupta- There has been a shift in the money transaction. And that shift has made the money transfer transparent. Businesses are shifting from informal ways of money transaction to the formal methods. Demonetization may have shrunk the market a little bit initially, but the software market has got a boost with the demonetization. With the growing demands of digitalization many software have managed to set the trend of the digital money and also have seen a lots of success.
Megha Mary-With GST just waiting round the corner, what previsions can be sketched out about the opportunities it would bring to IT industry.
Mr. Dinesh Gupta- GST will bring in lots of positive changes and it will redefine the way people do business but implementing the same will be a huge challenge for the government.
We, as part of the Application Software community, also have a big role to play in smooth transition to GST. We need to make businessmen aware of important concepts of GST. GST would have a very positive face towards IT industry. I think it’s a big opportunity after VAT. Once GST comes the business have to be formalized, more and more people would have to use IT for those purposes. Adding to it, GST guidelines says that there is a lot of online working to be done and without IT it’s not possible.
To file 36 returns it is really difficult to do manually, but IT would make things much easier, thus creating a lot of opportunities for IT industry to buckle up and bring about the changes.
Megha Mary-What is BUSY planning to welcome GST?
Mr. Dinesh Gupta- BUSY will make life easy in GST regime, as BUSY was the first Company to introduce Sales Tax, Excise and VAT in Accounting Software in India and, continuing the legacy, GST has also been implemented in BUSY 17.
BUSY is probably the first Accounting Software to offer GST compliance. In BUSY 17, a User can generate GST Invoice (both Tax & Bill of Supply), check their GST Liability, do the GST Adjustments and check other related reports. BUSY also offers flexibility to Users to change GST rates, category and Invoicing as per their need thus enabling them to work independently.
