Simplicity is the virtue
The Marwaris are a truly gifted lot. Shrewd and blessed with business acumen that is unmatched. Their wizardry in accounting is legendary. And when a Marwari father-son team develops the country’s most popular accounting software, it’s no surprise; “TALLY” – the most sought after software – is today synonymous with everything in business accounting. It was the need to get simple software to address the accounting woes of the business that led to the development of TALLY.
30 years ago they moved out of Calcutta and set up their textile business in Bangalore. Like all Marwaris, S.S. Goenka was training his only son Bharath into the rudiments of business. However, Bharath – though not an IT person – had other plans. Mr. Bharat Goenka, Co-Founder and CEO, Tally Solutions, an inspiration for many was inspired by a simple idea from his father, Founder Chairman, Tally Solutions Pvt. Ltd, Shri S. S. Goenka. The idea was born when Mr. Bharat Goenka, gifted an IBM computer to his father for managing accounts of our textile business. He says, that after evaluating a couple of accounting software available at that time, he told me to create one. The company was started with the belief and vision to help Indian businessmen with their most common business prerequisite-accounting. After four months of coding, I showed the first demo to my father – a payment for traveling expenses with the entry code ‘T 001’. My father could not understand the need for codes. He asked me: “Are you writing programs to make the life of the programmer easier or the life of the user easier?” We went back to work and came out with what was the first code-less accounting software. The company was born in 1986 as Peutronics. This software was called The Accountant with no codes.
Sticking to Product Industry
While dwarfed in size by the $70 billion software export sector, Indian product start-ups have been growing. From $113 million in revenue during 1999-2000, the Indian software product industry is now worth $1.81 billion (2011-2012).Tally – or rather Peutronics — was founded in 1986 at a time when much of the Indian software industry’s focus was on services. The shift to services took place in the mid-90s, particularly towards the edge of the Y2K environment. Regarding tthe decision to remain product centric, Mr. Goenka says, “We were one of the few stubborn companies who believed that while there was a lot of money to be made in services, we would never be able to address a lot of customers. So the mandate with which my father and I started the company in 1986 was that we were going to change the way millions of people do their business. We were clear that by moving to services, we would never be able to achieve the objective. We were unclear how long it would take us to get to a million — 25 years later, we are still trying to reach even the 1 million mark.”
With more than 2 million customers today, Tally is a shining beacon for thousands of product entrepreneurs in India. Mr. Bharat Goenka is often referred to as the “father of the Indian software product industry” given the fact that he was amongst the first to develop products for the Indian market using just a Personal Computer more than three decades back. Ethnography, which is about being inside the community to understand how the community works rather than studying it from outside. That enabled us to understand how accountants in India work, what they expect, their thinking process. Our product was tuned so that they accept it immediately. Now that we are a bigger company we understand better what bigger companies expect and we test the product on ourselves to see if it brings the efficiency we expect and only then we take it to market.
Associations
Tally is a principal charter member of ISODA (Infotech Software Dealers Association). Mr. Bharat Has recently started a new association called the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table, or iSpirt, with 30 IT companies with the aim of promoting product in IT.Regarding the association, Mr. Bharat says that the vision that India now has the basic building blocks to develop a powerful software product industry that can help transform the country and deliver invaluable solutions to the world was the driving force behind the association. We will be working in association with NASSCOM.
Professional Achievements
The NASSCOM Product Conclave has conferred, for the first time, a Lifetime Achievement Award to Mr. Bharat Goenka. This speaks volumes about the stature of this person. In the year 2012, he was conferred with the honor of Lifetime Achievement Award by Cell IT.
Word for Future Entrepreneurs
Plan your success. Don’t think about successfully making money, think about making success. Define that success and then work backwards. The way you choose your first 100 customers will decide whether you get to a million or not.
The Road Ahead
In May 2012, Goenka’s son Tejas (22) joined the business as an executive director after receiving a degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. With Mr. Tejas taking care of the sales and operations of the company, Bharat Goenka has again started focusing on the R&D side of the business. Mr. Goenka dreams of exceeding $1 bn in revenues by 20-14-15. After a long road pockmarked with struggle, success and then some colossal mistakes, Tally seems to have discovered itself and sees no reason why it shouldn’t take the open road ahead in warp speed. “For us, manual book keeping is the only competition,” says Goenka.
