Software, made in India | Book Reviews

The Product Code: Shoper, Tally and the Making of an Entrepreneur

by Shoaib Ahmed

Published by Westland

288 pages ₹699

What does it take to create a software product and get it accepted by Indian consumers or small businesses? As someone who has worked on two accounting products, EX Next Generation from Tata Consultancy Services and Wings from Wings Infonet Pvt Ltd, I am full of admiration for Tally, the made-in-India accounting and finance software package. Not only did Tally face the Indian competition with elan, it also withstood attack from the global major Intuit’s QuickBooks. 

So it was with great expectations that I picked up the book The Product Code by Shoaib Ahmed. Mr Ahmed is not the founder of Tally but of the point-of-sales software product Shoper. The first part of the book, “What it takes to build a product” takes us through the trials that Mr Ahmed and his partner Ravindran went through before they got the market to accept Shoper. Though they had an advantage since Mr Ahmed’s family had a garment retail business and that became the testing ground, selling was not easy. The author presents interesting examples of clients with whom he had to deal; the challenges he had to face; trips to Hong Kong to get the bar code reader and so on. 

His perseverance paid off when he landed Madura Coats as his first big corporate account. Madura with its spread of shops across the country gave team Shoper an opportunity to pressure test its product. And they came through with flying colours. Vedha Automation, the parent company of Shoper, was incorporated in the 1987-88 period. The breakthrough with Madura took six years to fructify and was finally implemented in the 1993-96 period. This gave Shoper market credentials and more shop chains, including global majors such as Adidas started adopting Shoper. While the company faced several threats, it did manage to ward off the competition to become a dominant player in the retail point-of-sale system in several market segments — among them apparel, fashion, footwear. 

The second part of the book, “What is a beautiful product: Tally” is about Mr Ahmed’s adventures after Shoper was acquired by Tally in 2005. Tally was originally launched in 1986 as an MS-DOS-based financial accounting program named Peutronics Financial Accountant by Bharat Goenka and his father Shyam Sunder Goenka. In 1988, the software was officially rebranded under the name Tally. The company was built through internal funds or, to use the Venture Capital term, boot-strapped. The book explains in lucid terms the way Tally was built and the issues it faced. One surprise was that unlike Microsoft, which took a draconian view of pirated MS Office software, BG (Bharat Goenka) seems to have seen the pirated Tally as the proverbial camel entering the tent. His guiding principle was that if small businesses use a pirated version of Tally, they will come to the official version when they want better features. 

It was not as if Tally had a smooth ride. Mr Ahmed points out periods when the company was bloated with numerous senior managers, multiple tiers and delayed decision-making. But through all that fog, the company emerged stronger thanks to some wise calls taken by BG and Mr Ahmed. I was happy to note that the author gives a lot of credit to the various training and learning interventions that Tally used to bring about an attitudinal shift in the team running the product. The book also presents BG’s guiding principle when he built Tally: Simplicity. The package had to be simple to install and simple to use. The book also points to the unique way the product was sold through a tiered system of distributors. I had known that Tally was the go-to software for chartered accountants as a client once told me, but the book confirms that belief. Wings, the brand I had worked on in the early 1990s, was promoted by a chartered accountant, Ajay Gandhi, from Hyderabad. 

The third part of the book, “How to develop entrepreneurs for a product nation” is a clarion call for more product companies to emerge in India. Mr Ahmed exited tally in 2016 and got actively involved in iSPRIT. This organisation was created by a group that included BG and others who felt that in addition to Nasscom there was a need to drive product development in India. 

Mr Ahmed held the position of founder-director at iSPRIT. This part of the book looks at why software product projects fail and presents some plausible solutions. Under Sharad Sharma’s leadership, iSPRIT seems to have had a useful role in working with the government in the spread of digital products, especially the India Stack consisting of UPI. 

The book is an engaging read and can be a useful guide to entrepreneurs who are looking to enter the exciting software product space. In short, the book says it is not easy, but the journey is exciting and the results can be bountiful.

The reviewer is a best-selling author of 12 books. His latest is the special tenth anniversary edition of Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles