Homegrown enterprise software maker Tally loses heavy hitter Shoaib Ahmed

Homegrown enterprise accounting software company Tally has lost a heavyweight this last week. The company’s president, Shoaib Ahmed, has quit to startup on his own.
Ahmed, has been instrumental in building the company’s sales and marketing efforts, which is seen as a success story in selling to Indian enterprises. The company says its software is used by more than 10 lakh Indian businesses.
Tally is one of the few homegrown companies that have broken into the Indian small and medium enterprise market. Though there are millions of SMBs in India (over 50 million), most of them don’t buy software products.
In an e-mail to employees on Wednesday, Tally’s co-founder and managing director Bharat Goenka said:
“In recent times, he has been closely looking at individual organizations struggling to get the technology rubber to hit the roads of their business operations, and has been itching to correct this problem systematically. He therefore, incubated Catalystor – an enterprise with the intent to make technology effective for businesses, and which he is now devoting 100% of his time to.”
Tally, meanwhile, has new competitors like Intuit. Piracy is also a major problem for the software maker.