Tally Piracy: A Never Ending Struggle for Tally

India has a list of successful companies to boast of in the software services space. Despite being the global leader in the IT space, we are nowhere near the global giants in the products segment. Many reasons can be cited including the lack of motivation to substitute R&D activities. However, there are few organizations that walked the road less travelled and also tasted success. Tally Solutions is certainly one of them. The organization is one of those that changed the perception that software systems are meant to be expensive and complex. It made them accessible as well as affordable to all. Tally has nearly become synonymous to accounting. However, the list of praises stops there. With all the promise it exemplified, the company, more than two decade old hasn’t moved much beyond its territories. As per a Tally insider, piracy has hit the company in a big way.

Over the years, what we have seen is a huge loss of value. There are about 40 lakh businesses in India. So far, IT hardware and software vendors have addressed only 50% of it. Tally has about 7 lakh registered users but the fact also looms that most of them use pirated versions. As per a third party research done over few years ago, about 90% of Tally’s usage is through pirated copies. The good news is that it has now come down to close to 70%. Piracy is one of the primary issues that have been bothering everyone. At times it does seem impossible. On the other hand the businesses in mature markets such as the USA that started at the same time as Tally have now become big buck organizations. This is because the rate of piracy in such countries is at about 25%.

Given the diversity and spread of our client base, it’s physically not possible to trace and stop piracy at the end user side. Unfortunately, business is not growing at the pace it needs to grow and its only growing incrementally. It has the potential to grow at a great extent and can achieve at least 3 times the growth if not more. This isn’t the case with Tally software alone but the entire IT industry. Tally with its entire latest version Tally ERP 9 marks its presence across 54 cities through more than 9,700 partners. The organization has more than 1000 employees operating in 14 cities. With business spreading around the globe the accounting master is expecting that it counters the threat of piracy which looms over it and provides more sophisticated versions in the near future.

Riyaz Tamboli is a Director at Antraweb Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of Tally ERP solutions built on the Tally platform.