In 1986, well before the ‘make in India’ program grabbed headlines, the country witnessed the creation of a company which later became what’s arguably the biggest success in the IT product space in India. Tally Solutions, initially known as Peutronics, was the big idea of Bharat Goenka. Today, Tally is synonymous with business accounting. The reason why Tally has been one of the very few purely home-grown application successes can be many. But one of the key factors is that the company always remained alert to changes in both IT infrastructure, OSes, and tax laws. While it gained a huge installed base of users quite rapidly, the company took a significant step in between by crashing its prices in a bid to gain market share and wean away users from pirated copies. Today, Tally sells into more than 100 countries and powers more than 8.5 lakh businesses worldwide. Bharat Goenka, its co-founder and managing director, has always been considered as the flag bearer of Indian software product sector. In an email interview with CIO.in, Goenka talks about why product companies should not go after ‘early success’ without having the foundational elements in place. Excerpts from the interview. CIO.in: India has many success stories around ‘services’, but very few around ‘products’. Tally is one of the biggest success stories in the product technology space. In your opinion, what made Tally successful? Bharat Goenka: The central reason for success is the determination to remain a ‘product’ company, and focus on mastering the nuances of how it impacts your engineering choices, policy choices, sales choices, and distribution choices along with support infrastructure choices, people choices, processes, and so on. Treating it as a business which is ‘different’ from other software businesses in all (and more) of these aspects have definitely had the greatest impact. The second most important reason has been working backwards from the assumption of success, and therefore, anticipating the potential problems of success and countering it by early investment and design. What was the single largest challenge you faced as a product company, especially at a time when all the attention went toward building the nation as a services’ hub? We do not correlate the past to ‘large challenges’, and there definitely was no challenge about being different from others. We were simply in a different industry, and worked within that specific frame. In some ways, to exaggerate the point, it is like asking Maruti the challenge it is facing in producing cars, when the airline industry is struggling (since both are in the ‘transportation’ business). Yes, making any software product sustainably successful is in itself a challenge, irrespective of what other related or unrelated industries are doing. Again, the answer to the first question has been our response to the objective of success. Tally now has users in more than 100 countries. How challenging was it for an indigenous Indian company to break out of the ‘made for India’ (which in fact was one of Tally’s strengths) image and spread its wings? It continues to be a strength rather than a branding challenge, since India epitomizes the complexity of business environment. Our success in a ‘made for India’ environment allows us to cleanly demonstrate the inherent strength of our flexibility, and robustness–which few other environments require to solve. We continue to pursue aggressive international business, as our relevance in those markets have been repeatedly proven. Lastly, as the flag bearer of Indian software product sector, what do you want to tell the new generation product start-ups in India? The persistent message I carry to fellow torch-bearers in the product sector is to work backwards from defining success, and then crafting the enablers for it. It is sometimes gratifying to see that this comes naturally to some people and sometimes dawns on people due to the conversation. At times its frustrating that despite appreciating these facets people continue to pursue ‘early success’ without the foundational elements associated with a defined success objective
