Tally's plans: Net big fishes, and go public

BANGALORE, INDIA: Business management software company Tally Solutions Private Ltd (Tally) has expanded its target and the company is now planning to tap the large enterprise and government accounts. And if everything move according to the plan, in a couple of years the company may go public.

As of now about 90 per cent of Tally's customers are small and medium enterprises. Looking forward, it wants to increase the contribution from other two market segments too - the large enterprises and government sector, said Shoaib Ahmed, president of Tally Solutions Private Limited.

“Tally has been the market leader in the SME sector. Our larger chunk of the business comes from the small and medium business. We have been playing at the bottom two levels of the pyramid for long and now aim to tap the entire market,” he said.

“We have the internal target of achieving around one and a half lakh customers from larger enterprises in the next five years. We will release special edition of the existing products like Tally ERP9 called Series B and C. They would have diamond and platinum levels of licenses, which means more than a hundred or thousand licenses. Our solutions would have volume-handling, large-scale deployment and scalability capabilities,” said Ahmed.

As a part of the strategy, the Bangalore-based product company has laid down an adoption road map, wherein by the next 8-12 months, the company will start rolling out specific solution targeted for the large enterprise, he added.

When asked about SaaS-based ERP solutions, Avinash Gupta, president, Tally Solutions, replied, “We do have a plug-and-play ERP and accounting option for the customers and the technology is ready for it. But our market understanding is that customers are still worried on the issues of sending their databases on hosted environment. They are happier with cloud options that are built internally, like our Tally Internet solution.”

Avinash elaborated that the company focuses on the value-added initiatives.

He added, “We aim to change the whole paradigm of ERP companies and the customers. Companies would no longer pay just for the maintenance or vanilla implementation, instead they will get the value add.”

Tally's present clientèle in government departments and enterprises includes National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Rural Development Department called VKP, Tata Docomo, Maruti and many more.

On the sidelines of the discussion, Avinash also hinted that Tally would look at going public within the next two-three years.

He said, “Market does perceive that getting listed is all about money. Since we have never faced the issue of money, we did not think of issuing IPO. However, as the company grows, in the next few years we may go public - most probably within the next two-three years.”