Interaction - Priyanka Swain, Director, Engineering, Tally Solutions

Priyanka Swain, Director, Engineering, Tally Solutions, plays a strategic as well as a technical role within the company. She talks to us.

What products are most in demand by the MSMEs today?

Priyanka Swain - In today’s world for MSMEs to grow their business exponentially they definitely need and are undergoing a digital transformation. There are multiple aspects to the business expansion starting from ease and effective of managing business to a compliant Business Management software.

Expanding the reach of the business to wider audience by using E-commerce platforms is another priority of the MSMEs, as is also using data/business analytics tools to get insights into various customer trends and other businesses is giving MSMEs a competitive edge in the market. Through these insights, MSMEs can reduce risk by understanding expected demand cycles, customer feedback and market gaps. Mobility is in demand for MSMEs. Be it for tracking their own business on the go or giving their customers the ease to buy/sell/transact online from anywhere. Through usage of Digital Payment platforms like Paypal/Paytm/GPay etc MSMe can make their payouts and collections seamless, secure and fast and have seamless reconciliation of their books

 In order to have a wider reach including going global, building a brand name and of course added sales, MSMEs are moving towards digital marketing through various platforms like social media, email or web-based advertising.   

Does Tally develop its own technology for products, or do you apply techs brought from other sources on your products?

Priyanka Swain - At Tally’s heart is its own homegrown technologies crafted for MSMEs. We do tech innovation to deliver unique experiences and capabilities at scale and we are a technology company. We have developed our own Database engine that is super-fast, simple (installs without any manual intervention) and reliable (recovers from practically any software or hardware failure).

We have our own application development language engine (TDL) for rapid application development and customisation. We also have our own IDE used by thousands of TDL developers across our ecosystem. Further, we have our own UI engine, interpreters, parsers and our own data types, all of which are specially designed to handle business domain problems. 

What is the R&D focus of Tally for product development?

Priyanka Swain - R&D at Tally focuses on continuous innovation considering the changes happening in the industry and various technology trends. We evaluate and understand in depth about those technologies with R&D on how to bring values for our customers.

We realise the importance of building a connected business and hence one of our major themes is towards building a connected Tally which is integrated with various systems be it Taxation systems/Financial or Lending Orgs/Banks/Account Aggregator/Market Places/Social Media etc to ultimately reach a state where we can create a network of businesses by connecting all Tally systems.

Many things are happening as we speak on WhatsApp, Payments, Blockchain, ONDC etc.

We believe in simplifying the day-to-day activity of our customers, to achieve this we leave no stone unturned. We are never constrained by available technologies, and we are continuously upgrading or creating our technologies to solve customers’ problems in the right way keeping our design principles intact like the “Artichoke Principle” which handles our scale of diversity, “Exceptions make or break the system” which leads us to handle every exception known or unknown etc.  We believe our customers should focus on running their business the way they want and not adapting to our software.

How does the engineering team of Tally keep updated with the new techs emerging in the market and how do you improve upon them?

Priyanka Swain - We follow different trends and collect ideas both top down and bottom up. While various trends surface up, we keenly evaluate what technologies have the potential to really benefits the MSME businesses globally. Not all technologies and buzzwords that come up pass this filter. We consider how we can contribute to making the tech itself better, and how it can be leveraged to help our customers.

Some examples are -

• Account Aggregator - To facilitate credit flow to MSMEs, and to ensure eco-system is shaped to ensure MSME requirements are considered, we have been an active participant of this eco-system.
• TP on AWS - with increasing popularity of cloud solutions and the need for Remote working during covid days, and of course MSMEs wanting to leverage it, we came up with TP on AWS, which is a low cost, cloud availability solution of our flagship products on cloud.
• Invoice Financing through the trust of Blockchain – Introduction of score which determines the trust worthiness of a business.

Tally Reports in browser - which businesses increasingly want to access data on the go, we came up with innovative solution of letting customers use their own Tally instance as a server to access data.

Read more from Dr Archana Verma here 

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