CXO Speak
‘We are a company obsessed with customer experience’ Tally Solutions is undoubtedly the leading GST accounting software company in the Indian market. In an interaction with CRN, Harsha Kodnad, Director – Technology, Tally Solutions, speaks about the various aspects of product development and the company’s increased focus on R&D and innovation By Nivedan Prakash Can you highlight the technology trends prevailing in the industry, which is going to lay the foundation for future product development at Tally Solutions? While technology as it emerges definitely plays a crucial role in continuously laying the foundation for our product development, it is always identifying ‘user problem(s)’ unsolved or not solved well. This is pivotal for our roadmap and lays the foundation for future products. With our purpose of engineering to solve these user problems exceptionally well, which is useful, delightful and flawless, we need to identify the right experience that will make this. This uncompromisable experience is what influences us to create (or sometimes adopt) the right technology. The point is that, the technology is an enabler having the potential of solving every problem and hence a trend created on that hype. For us, the technology comes after the experience i.e. the architecture and associated technology choice are after the product design. For instance, while moving to browser-based applications is a technology trend, we believe that having a thick application on the device will always be better from a responsiveness and offline working perspective.
BE IT INTERFACE, INTERACTION EXPERIENCE OR INFORMATION DESIGN, WE GIVE GREAT IMPORTANCE TO NFRS (NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS SUCH AS SPEED, FLEXIBILITY, SIMPLICITY, RELIABILITY) And while moving the application and compute on the cloud, which has the potential to bring down capital cost and provide anytime anywhere access, it has the tendency to increase the regular operational cost, impacting the privacy and security of the customer data, and needing a always-on internet making it difficult to run businesses. Hence, we believe in pushing more compute to the customer’s device; thus reducing the operational cost of using cloud, as well as provide an exceptional responsiveness of application, leaving the control of the data in the user’s hands, while still make it available anytime-anywhere.
As enterprises are digitally transforming their businesses, how are you fuelling innovation in your product offerings?
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The goal of the enterprise is not to digitally transform their business but to become more effective, efficient and attain exponential growth. The digital transformation is an aid in making that happen. We have continuously believed in the growth of our customers. Each of our product offering and continuous evolution of our product adding various features, experience and simplification is pivoted on this objective.
Tell us about the various facets of your product development - be it design or architecture among other areas? How these are weaved in to create a master product? We are a company obsessed with customer experience. For us, it is about solving a customer problem exceptionally well. This requires a lot of discovery/research mode working to find the right problem. An open problem with enough diversity, various exceptions that can break the adoption. Be it interface, interaction experience or information design, we give great importance to NFRs (Nonfunctional requirements such as Speed, Flexibility, Simplicity, Reliability), and hence, we put immense efforts in making a design that first gives us the visualisation of these outcomes. Our product development is more
