Friday, September 01, 2006

The Greatest Product Success in India

If one rummages through the Infotech history of India, one might not come across the success of many software products, except a few like Tally and Finacle. In the comparison between the two, Tally is a more powerful brand because of the number of licences used in the Indian market. Today, Tally accounting software is the default software for most of the enterprises (small or big).

Even being the market leader with a huge market share, the company is not complacent because the think-tank knows the job is not complete as nothing is permanent and there is a big challenger in piracy. Giving a perspective of the Tally activities in the Indian and overseas markets, Bharath Gopalakrishnan, President, CEO – South Asia Business, Tally Solutions Private Ltd., says, “The current go-to-market strategy of the company is to increase the availability and affordability of its product ranges. In terms of product availability, Tally is trying to address the market through increasing its presence across all the geographies. The fundamental thing that the company has done over the last one and a half years is that it has increased its presence everywhere. It has engaged more and more partners to sell the products. The theory behind making all software sellers as Tally partners is that all reseller community carries different legacy of customers and by making them Tally customers, the company can increase its geographic reach. Tally believes that these sorts of engagements will not only benefit Tally itself, but, at the same time, it will also increase the source of revenue for the resellers’ community.”

Of course, Tally products carry lots of reasons for the reseller to engage themselves with the company. On this front, Gopalakrishnan adds, “Today, Tally is providing a lot of upgradation, new modules are continuously coming up and we are also providing multi-users application for the customers. Apart from that, we are going to provide vertical-specific module for the pharmaceutical segment. In this manner, we are providing multiple opportunities for the reseller to continuously go to the same client. Beside that, there is opportunity in the space of service.”

Apart from that, the company continuously keeps on talking with the reseller community to ensure that their income is considerably increased with the passage of time. On the other side, Tally tries to empower the reseller community and make ensure that they have convenient distributors from where they could easily procure its products so that their credit exposure is all covered.

Tally has direct competition with piracy and manual accounting. However, its continuous engagement with the channel partners and making the products available across the geography will surely help the company.

Secondly, the company tries to make the products affordable so that it becomes compelling to fight the menace of pirated software. Gopalakrishnan says that these sorts of activities have helped the company to cut down the usage of pirated Tally software from 90 per cent to approximately 60 per cent. Not only this, he believes that the activities of the company have changed the buying behaviour of customers as the products have become more available and affordable.

If we see Tally over the last two years, the company has moved from eighty-nine employees to a thousand employees’ company with a presence in 15 locations in the country. With the passage of time, the company has also increased its service support level. The company provides three types of supports – voice support, support through chatting and e-mail support. Currently, Tally has established a helpdesk which has more than 130 people.

The objective of Tally as a whole is that it wants to be 100-per cent available in the marketplace. Apart from catering to the SMBs, mid-segment and enterprises, the company also provides a huge opportunity for the student community who are looking for jobs. The students can go to its academies and learn Tally. Beside that, the company is also engaging the universities to provide courses based on the Tally software.

On the distribution front, Tally is engaged with eSys Information Technologies Ltd. as its distribution partner. In the next twelve months, the company is coming out with a lot of exciting things. The fist thing is that it is coming out with vertical-specific products for chemists. Apart from that, it is going to launch Tally personal software which will help the individuals to manage their personal assets.

Tally 8.1
Recently, the company has launched Tally 8.1, the breakthrough business accounting and inventory management software, which is the successor to the VAT-compliant and highly successful Tally 7.2. This leading-edge software solution supports the concurrent use of all the Indian languages. In fact, it is the world’s first business application to support the concurrent or simultaneous use of all the Indian languages. At present, India uses 11 uni-directional scripts (left to right and top to bottom) and Tally 8.1 supports all of them. Upon installation of Tally 8.1, a user can maintain accounts in Hindi and send invoices to customers in Baroda, in Gujarati. He can also issue purchase orders to suppliers in Kolkata in Bengali and Chennai in Tamil, and generate delivery challans to transporters in Kannada, Telugu or Punjabi. Tally 8.1 is able to support the normal English keyboard and its parallel use as a phonetic entry keyboard for Indian languages. This ensures a far higher level of intuitiveness and subsequently an easier learning process for entering information in the regional languages. With this launch, Tally is aiming to ensure a new mantra of “Anek Bhasha, Ek Tally” is resoundingly true for times to come.

In order to involve the developer community in enhancing solutions for end-users, Tally has opened up the market for providing solutions in and around Tally. The major initiative has been taken to simplify the integration of Tally with the existing IT infrastructure of end-users and also to better meet their business requirements. Tally Definition Language (TDL) which is the object-oriented language with which Tally itself has been written allows unrestricted re-usage of code and interacts closely with the underlying object-oriented database. The Developer tool is targeted at developers with ISVs, SIs, entrepreneurs, students and Tally partners.

Tally Developer is a big boon for the channel partners as it allows them to value-add greatly to their business by being able to address the unique requirements of each customer. At the same time, Tally has also opened its gates for the student community by introducing a training and certification programme on the Tally Definition Language.

The company is planning to hold events to promote the initiatives. Tally is also planning to broaden the developer ecosystem outside India in the Middle East, APAC and North Africa.

On the service front, mostly the Tally partners offer services to the customers. The company is planning to increase its service share of the business to 20–30 per cent of revenues in the coming year.

After achieving success in the business accounting space, Tally has now entered the ERP space. The company is positioning this product as affordable and trusted. Tally is expected to leverage its relationship with the enterprises. The company will even move forward and tie up with the local manufacturers and OEMs for marketing this product.

Publication : VAR India
Edition : All India