A case study from Bangalore’s Sonic Software Boom: Bharat Goenka of Tally Solutions
He took his father’s home-spun advice to heart. And India’s best-known accounting package was born. For the first time, here’s the full story. An excerpt from Start-up City: Ten Tales of Exceptional Entrepreneurship from Bangalore’s Software Miracle, by Moloy K. Bannerjee, Siddharth Bannerjee, P. Ranganath Sastry.
India is known as the software support Mecca of the world today. Globally, nearly every big product developer and retail chain has some form of support outsourced to a base in India. As a business opportunity, this has been a golden goose for entrepreneurs in the Indian software industry, but the fact remains that these opportunities have come at the cost of an indigenous product development mentality. So we have a scenario wherein domestic talent is nurtured and ideas abound, yet end-to-end (software-based) product development is still sorely lacking. One totally desi company that has defied this trend and created India’s most successful software product is Tally Solutions, with an astonishing market penetration of over 80 per cent.
• ‘Are you writing programs to make the life of the programmer easier or the life of the user?’ This fundamental question raised by Bharat Goenka’s father triggered in him an obsession with user-friendliness and customer-oriented business solutions.
• Tally’s accounting software is now used by nearly 80 per cent of the market.
• It is among the first software products worldwide to give an unlimited multi-user licence.
• In the twenty successful years of its existence, Tally Solutions has had about 140 upgrades but has charged customers only about three to four times.
Bharat Goenka, the founder of Tally, is perhaps in the best position to tell us what it takes to be a market and brand leader. His story reveals an enduring passion for customer-oriented solutions and an inclination for innovative financial risk management and tireless perseverance. Additionally, there is an abiding spiritual dimension to Bharat Goenka’s life, a quintessentially Indian trait that places his work in the larger context of the true meaning of life.
Our first meeting with Bharat is a revelation in itself.We make sure we get to his office right on time because we are told that he is a stickler for punctuality. We have been in his spacious conference room for only a minute or two when he walks in briskly. He comes across as a modest and unassuming man with a sense of humility about everything around him. It takes some persuasion to make him recount his story.
His expertise on the subject and sense of discipline quickly become apparent as he speaks, moving deftly from one point to another in chronological order. What strikes us right away is his complete grasp of the situation; his mastery over everything to do with his product and his company is clear from the way he goes into minute details. Without seeming boastful, he talks about his achievements and mistakes with equal ease.
Overall, his outlook for Tally Solutions is optimistic, sometimes even sounding ‘outlandish’ as he himself puts it at one point in the conversation. Yet he exudes the toughness, persistence and enthusiasm that you see in successful entrepreneurs: the grit to achieve what they set out to.
The story begins in 1981 when Bharat had just graduated with a degree in science from National College, Basavanagudi, in Bangalore. His father was in the textile business, supplying to several textile mills around the country (including the famous Binny Mills). Coming from a Marwari family, it was quite natural for the young boy to migrate from college into business. PCs were just entering the Indian market around this time.
In 1984, his father first bought a computer system for their company from Eiko — their first business computer — and then began a search for suitable accounting software to run on the machine. Vendor after vendor came and gave a demonstration of their respective products. His father would sit for maybe ten to fifteen minutes, then terminate the demo. Bharat told us how his father couldn’t understand the first thing about operating the system.
He would tell the vendor, ‘When I buy a car, I don’t want to be a mechanic; I just want to be able to drive it.’ Six months later, out of sheer frustration, he told his son, ‘We cannot find anything.You keep telling me that you have a lot of skills in this (computers), so why don’t you create something for us?’
Bharat’s only exposure to programming had been a four-day course in FORTRAN he had done in college, when it had seemed an interesting hobby for an introvert like him. Nevertheless, he took up his father’s challenge and was ready with results in two months. His demo lasted less than two minutes. Bharat started out by entering a transaction for travelling expenses. He keyed in the date. Next, he keyed in the characters ‘T001’.
His father asked what ‘T001’ was. A code for travelling expenses, the son replied. So why not simply write ‘travelling expenses’, the father cross questioned. Bharat explained that computers don’t understand English; they only understand codes. And that was the end of the demo.
His father did not understand what codes computers used and why they did not understand English. Bharat explained that it was easier to write programmes using software code. At which point, his father made a statement that transformed Bharat’s approach to writing software for life. ‘Are you writing programmes to make the life of the programmer easier or the life of the user?’ This fundamental question proved to be a major turning point in what has since become a near obsession with user-friendliness and customer-oriented business solutions.
After the last failed attempt, it took almost eight months for Bharat to develop a product that his father could use. It was codeless and it operated the way that his father wished it to, i.e., without any need for the user to learn computer coding. As a technophobe, his father had refused to learn about computers and that made him the best possible test-subject to measure the accessibility and user- friendliness of a software design. In fact, all his father was capable of doing was to insert a floppy disk, type in ‘A:’ and start the demo. After using the product for a month, Bharat’s father advised him to use his talent on a bigger scale and lend such expertise to the rest of India. After all, there were thousands of users who could benefit.
That commitment to user-friendly product development, taught by Bharat’s father, was to be a hallmark of all systems developed by Tally. For example, Bharat recalls a time when there was a particular feature of a cost-centre application that had taken him six months to build and incorporate into the system.The addition of the feature was a matter of pride for him as he felt that it had shaped up very well.
But when his father used it for the first time, the application did not execute. Bharat tried to show his father the right way to make the software work, but it hit him then that he wouldn’t be there standing by for thousands of customers who would probably face the same problem. A moment’s discovery of faulty design had flushed six months of hard work down the drain and a new design and implementation process had to be created afresh.
Bharat says that this rigorous development and testing mindset in the initial stages itself ‘instilled into our DNA (the idea) that, it does not matter if we have to throw away our code and start anew from scratch’. In fact, the Tally product has been rewritten six times in its lifetime of twenty years, and according to Bharat, the courage to throw away years of work and start afresh comes with adopting this philosophy.
Another example is when they changed over from 8-bit to 32-bit systems and transitioned to the Windows operating system; they did not carry any of the old code; they re-started from scratch instead. Bharat attributes all this to the resilience that has been built up over years of trial and error which now allows him to absorb all the complexity of software design and turn it into a simple user-friendly product.
The challenge first issued by Bharat’s father, which eventually became entwined with the fabric of all product development, was to integrate the power of simplicity into each piece of software, allowing them to differentiate the market segment into ‘those who use Tally and those who will use Tally’.
