Tally Education, which was started in 1999, has crossed 1,000 academies milestone.  Avinash Gupta, CEO, Tally Education, told he has no intension to get into niche IT market where as he wants Tally Education  to be the biggest education and vocation service provider in the world in an intraction with Sudesh Prasad. Excerpts of an interview: 

Sudesh Prasad: What are the aims and objectives of Tally Education?
Avinash Gupta: Tally Education is an initiative of Tally Software to train the non-users of IT. We have a network of centers called Tally Academies. We recently crossed the milestone of having 1,000 academies in the country in two years. We have an authorized center concept, which means that anyone can run a tally course in addition to others. So, the partner's infrastructure is not captive to Tally. They are not purchasers of the Tally software. We are not into a niche IT market. We are a vocational education service provider. We own the IPR of the product and we are training on it. We started our education initiatives in 1999 but it is in the last two years that the organization has reinvented itself and has made training business as a separate SBU. We conducted a survey recently, got in touch with about 20,000 companies and from that derived the number of accountants are required.

SP: What are your future plans?
AG:We want to be the biggest education and vocation service provider in the world. We want to determine what the world is going to learn and how it is going to learn. This year, we intend to train two lakh students across the country.

SP: Earlier you said that Tally does not require training. Why now have you planned to train people on the software?
 AG: I agree, it is a paradoxical situation. Tally is a type of mini ERP and we don't see people using more than 30-40% of the software's capacity. We have modeled our course design on spiral learning approach and have a modular structure. As a part of the course, we give a training version of the software, which the student can work on, if he or she has a PC at home. Our target audience are those doing manual accounting and interested in enhancing their employability.

SP: Are you working with educational institutions?
AG: We have tied up with the University of Bangalore which has about 330 colleges, and provide them software to work on and training teachers, free of cost. Other universities like Himachal Pradesh University, Osmania University, Rajiv Gandhi University, Delhi University, Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada University, Tamil Nadu Open University and Directorate of Technical Education, Karnataka, teaches Tally as part of their curriculum. We have set up an academic council which include eminent educators from leading universities and business schools, prominent accounting professionals, industry partners and HR managers. This council guides the content development team of our in-house R&D center.