Advertisment

Tally: Story of human language in computing

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

It was a hot Monday afternoon when we met Bharath Goenka to talk about India's first packaged software developed to handle the finances of any organization. A cool and composed Goenka welcomed us with a smile to answer CIOL readers' questions to him.

Advertisment



Bharath Goenka, the only son of SS Goenka, was forced to develop a new accounting software when a host of accounting packages, which were available in the market, didn't help him.



Advertisment

“Our father had a business which was related to textile industry. We needed a good accounting package for the business. During that time, there were a lot of accounting packages available in the market. But all of them did require certain tech knowledge to operate. I wanted to develop a new accounting software that supported the conventional method of writing accounts.”



“So I started my work and one day I called my father for a demo. I told him to type T001 on the computer. My Father asked what is this 'T001' all about. I told him that the computers do not understand our language, but work only on Binary, which we had to key in commands in its language. At this my father asked me to develop a software which can understand the human language instead of forcing him to learn the computer language. It took almost 18 months since that day to develop the first version of the accounting software,” recalls Goenka.

Advertisment



Today, Tally has a global reputation and acceptance for its simplicity. CIOL would bring the story of India's first IT product company which enjoys the trust of over 6 lakh customers and the largest partner network with over than 20,000 partners and which has won 12 consecutive PCQuest users' choice awards.



Advertisment

In this episode of 'Journey to the Top', we are selecting a few questions from the readers, who have asked Bharat Goenka about his company and the product.



What made you to start Tally? Why did you choose product business?

Advertisment



Shika Kempola



Advertisment

Bharat Goenka: The first part, what made us to start Tally, was to try and find a solution to our own business. We used to run our own SSI. During the first six months of its development, we were not really trying to start a business but find a solution for our own business. But, in the meanwhile we realized what we were trying to do has the potential of touching the lives of a million! That is when we took the conscious decision to develop a full-fledged product.



For the second part of the question, on why a product business. There was hundred per cent clarity that we want to touch the lives of a million, and we could do it only through a product framework. We first went to the market after 18-20 months since we started working on the product.

Advertisment



What was your thought process when you decided to bring out a financial accounting software firm? Was it actually needed then?



DS



BG: Absolutely needed then, now and will be needed in future too! If you are doing a successful business, but do have your finances in the grip, you cannot predict the future. And, even if your business is not doing well, but if you have control of the finances, you will have the potential to turn it around.



From that perspective it is a durable need, and effectively from that thought we were always looking at solving the business problem. But what is central to the business problem is that if you cannot solve your finance-related problem, then any other business problem is irrelevant to solve.



Also Read: Philanthropy is a state of mind: Shiv Nadar



There was not even a single large player of today, which did not have a software in that time. TCS had its Master Key series, Softeck had Sins, Wipro had its product called BSS, Vishesh Technologies had SunPack... enough of them. We tried all of them and my father could not understand them. He said something that we follow even today and you will find the reflections of this in our product — “When I buy a car, I want to be the driver and not a mechanic.” Similarly, we buy computers to run business, but not to be computer engineers.

{#PageBreak#}



Why do you still have the same old logo and branding? Don't you think it restricts your product only to the financial products?



Srini



BG: Tally is a brand, so when you talk about a brand, it does not mean anything. Take LG, for example. How many of us would know it basically was Lucky Gold Star? So when you start something, there may or may not be a correlation.



We believe that we have got a good, recognized brand, so play around with it. What we play around with is the capability. But again, it is something that has been dynamic and will change with time. What stays is the brand.



Is Tally thinking of diversifying from its core vertical? With SaaS, cloud and mobile-based apps emerging, how do you see yourself scale and grow?



Ajanka



BG: We will always perpetually create technologies which are relevant to our customers. Today we have got certain judgments about how cloud-enabled technologies will be useful to customers, and keeping that in mind, we have introduced Tally Net Service. Today you can access Tally on mobile phone.



But I am not able to connect to vertical. There is no such vertical called premise-based computing Vs cloud-based computing. The space that we are in presently is to enable velocity of business, how do you increase the velocity of transactions, to bring economic growth.



Some day we may participate in the buyers' space, and look at accelerating velocity of transaction from the buyer side. That will mean entering in the consumer space, but today we operate and focus on business space, because there is a long journey ahead and there is lot to be done here.



You are yet a single product company. A couple of questions: 1. Did you ever think of trying other products? 2. Are you planning other products in the near future?



HG



BG: It is a complex question to answer whether we are a single product company or not. We are a focused product company for sure. And presently, within this organizational structure, we do not look at shifting our focus.



If at all we ponder over shifting the focus, it is unlikely to happen under this company framework. So here we talk about two things — company's focus (which is Tally) and owners focus (the company); and right now both the focuses are the same.

{#PageBreak#}



Yours is a 26-year-old company. Don't you think that by now Tally would have been developed into a full-fledged ERP product or higher? Are you complacent in its development?



Bimal Saraogi



BG: The easiest problem to solve is the problem of structured environment and the toughest is to solve the complex IT-based problems of the unstructured environment. We are extremely proud of the fact that we are successfully solving problems of unstructured environment and the problem is not yet fully solved. Yes, in the meantime we are bringing in scalability in the solution so that we can handle the large enterprises.



People talk about evolving from simple to complex; we started from complex, and now working on simple problems with large enterprises is just a small problem. There are only a handful of companies who have the capabilities to deal with complex problems, and very soon, the bigger companies looking top of the pyramid will use our technologies to solve simple problems.



Q. Do you believe in role models? If yes, who is your role model?



Poorinama Nag



BG: At personal level no actually, but yes, from a social level. A role model sets the boundary conditions. If there is a boundary, defined roadmap, then you move faster, but it also constraints one inside that boundary. This is again the question of personal perspective.



Did you work elsewhere before stating Tally?



Rizwan



BG: There were three companies that we ran. Vijay Bobbins, Karnataka Trade and Bharat Enterprises, but everything stopped 20 years ago. Vijay Bobbins was a factory that used to manufacture bobbins used in a spinning mill; Karnataka Trades as well as Bharat Enterprise traded in supplies in textile mills.





Despite one of the early technology companies, why is Tally not in the big five league?



Sandeep



BG: Actually we play in two different business. I cannot envisage how to handle 100,000 big number of people. Similarly, these top five might be capable of handling 100,000 customers. While these top five have created the skill of managing large team, I have created the skill of dealing with large number of customers with a small team.



We are same industry but different business; for us it is software product business, which is different from their services business. We are in the top level among the companies that play in my domain. That does not mean that we have achieved all that could be achieved. We are in the learning process.



Perhaps if there were more companies similar to my business, together we could have achieved more than we achieving it individually. So in some aspects, being the only player in the market has some disadvantages; one has to individually develop, grow the market.



Given a chance, do you want to become an entrepreneur again?



Divya



BG: For me, the concept of entrepreneurship is to do with playing what is the zero-sum game. Going to the edge is like reaching one level ahead of bankruptcy. So once you get the thrill, you do not want to be anything else.



Can you describe a challenging work issue you had to face? And how did you deal with it?



Madhusudhan



BG: In work, one of the biggest challenges is temptation. And this has been a critical factor for our success. We started from a sick SSI, where money was a scare factor. And here we had our customers willing to pay for the services. We struggled with payroll, but did not take the service as a charge. We were very clear in mind that we will continue to be a product company and give services for free, but not constraint the resources in services.



Who selected the name Tally?



Ms. Juneja



BG: Our company was called Peutronics and our first product was PFA (Peutronics Financial Accounting). We had got around 300 customers, when we went to the advertisement agency O&M for a brand briefing. When we gave the brief, we ensured that the PFA title was retained. When we had our first presentation with Vijay Bhatt (then creative manager) he showed the presentation requesting us to overlook at the name in the presentation and imagine PFA with Tally. But in that one hour of presentation, we were brainwashed by Tally and found it really suitable.



What is your success mantra?



Kavya Sreedhar



BG: If you solve your problem, it will never matter; to make a difference you will have to solve others' problem. It started with my father. I was giving a demo to my father, and was entering a code in the software. During that he said, “Are you writing programs to make the life of a programmer easier or to make the life of the user easier?” The core capabilities that came in Tally were based on this fundamental mantra.



In this journey, did you ever think of selling off your company?



Chandru



BG: Many many people have thought of buying my company, that is for sure. We never started a company to sell it off. For us earning money was never the objective.

tech-news