IT industry not supportive of e-governance

Tally Solutions, a leading enterprise software product company, is one of the Indian companies that has made it big in the area. Suparna Goswami Bhattacharya speaks to co-founder and managing director Bharat Goenka about the company’s journey and its ambitions     

You have been a part of India’s IT growth story for the past 25 years. How do you think the Indian government fared in introducing IT in governance?
The government has done a good job so far. The Indian IT industry has not been very supportive, as they have been largely focused on tasks outside India. The government has been trying to use IT in governance without support of the best brains of the industry. There have been delays but the government has been able to achieve some success by itself. It is credible enough in my opinion.

Most of Indian IT giants were your competitors in the 1980s. They shifted to services sector and achieved great success. Do you regret not exploring this territory?
When we started 25 years ago, companies like TCS, Wipro and Sonata were all in this field and went through multiple product cycles as well. For the first 10 years, we faced a lot of competition from these companies. However, over the years, they ventured into other fields as they lost interest in the product market. From day one we knew we were going to be a product company.
 
Do you think Indians are generally averse to using new technology?
In fact, India is far more experimental with technology than anyone else in the world. That is because most of Indian populace has largely been deprived of new technology. Whatever comes to us, we are willing to try it. For example, around 10 years ago, I was part of the Reliance Infocomm initiative. We had decided to distribute the data capability on the phone for free. The region from where we got the best response was not a tech-savvy city of Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh but Bihar, because it was the most under-served market.
 
Currently, what are the focus areas of Tally?
We will help in making transactions faster as I believe the faster the money moves in the system, the better it is for the economy. This is our core capability and strength. By 2030, we want to want to be the technology fabric that drives economic growth of the world.
 
How do you plan to achieve this?
We work backwards. For instance, we need to be in a certain position by 2015 to achieve our 2030 objective. So currently our focus is to do everything possible to achieve our 2015 milestone. Though small and medium enterprises (SMEs) will remain our focus, we want to cater more to the large enterprises.
 
You have worked closely with the government. How important is the government for you as a client?
Government is an important customer to us. Almost 10% of our revenue comes from it. We also believe that we are in the best position to handle the problems the government has, because most of our customers are SMEs.

Also, the kind of network of sales and services we have, it allows us to take up large governmental issues and solve them effectively. We plan to help the government in implementing Goods and Service Tax (GST) or the direct tax code. We will provide GST-enabled software to all our customers for free.

What is your revenue target for the year?
By 2015, we want to be $1billion company. To achieve this, we plan to have revenue of $100 million by end of this year. We need to do something drastic to achieve this, but I am confident we will. The large untapped market makes me confident. There are 80 lakh SMEs in India.