Deputy Director of the Center for Infrastructure Solutions at JSC

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According to Ilya Shabanov, CEO of AM Media LLC, the crisis in the IT segment associated with the departure of foreign vendors from the Russian market has not yet been overcome. Opening the conference "The Information Technology Market in Russia. Results of 2023", he noted that, on the one hand, in some segments, the voids that arose in 2022 could not be filled, but at the same time, in others, on the contrary, there is high variability and one has estonia whatsapp number database to choose from a large number of products, often not mature enough. As a result, Ilya Shabanov concluded that it is easier for businesses to maintain the operability of infrastructure built on foreign solutions, if necessary, replacing the missing fragments with parallel import purchases or even unlicensed software simply because the risks in the event that something goes wrong during the migration process will be higher, and at the same time no one is pushing the business.

Infosystems Jet, Alexander Belyaevsky, believes that regulators exist and they are really pushing market players toward import substitution. For example, the Bank of Russia is active in relation to large banks, but the smaller the institutions, the weaker this pressure. In addition, he noted that there is no liability for failure to comply with regulatory acts, including Decree No. 166 of the President of the Russian Federation "On measures to ensure technological independence and security of the critical information infrastructure of the Russian Federation", which directly prohibits the acquisition of any foreign software for the relevant facilities.

Alexander Osipov, Director of Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions at MegaFon ProBusiness, named the economy as the main reason for such inertia: migration to domestic solutions does not bring direct benefits to businesses, but is expensive in itself and is associated with additional risks of disruption to normal operations or data loss. In his opinion, migration from one cloud to another is no less difficult, but examples play a positive role here, including those from the state, which is actively developing GosTech and GosOblako.

Head of the Advanced Research Group at Astra Group Roman Mylitsyn noted that Russian developers have not yet solved the integration problem: different products work separately, but attempts to assemble a single solution are unsuccessful, and these problems need to be urgently solved. According to Roman Mylitsyn, the formation of ecosystems, both single-vendor and created in partnership, should help resolve this complexity. He predicted that in 2024 the process of forming such ecosystems will begin, and integrated software stacks will also appear.

Alexander Belyaevsky also drew attention to the complexity of import substitution projects: Russian software needs to be tested, and it is important to pay attention to the fact that different products may not work together correctly or not work at all, and behave differently on different hardware platforms. And in general, migration, especially when it comes to large data sets, is a complex task. He gave the example of one large company, where out of 2,000 Oracle databases processed by the Exadata complex, only eight were transferred to a Russian DBMS since 2021, and this project started before 2022.

Oleg Afanasyev, Product Director of RuStore, OOO VK (VK), noted that the situation is noticeably different in different segments of the IT market: if inertia is really very high in terms of large infrastructures, then in the mobile application segment, migration to domestic application stores is happening very quickly. In his opinion, high variability in the market will not last long. Ilya Shabanov stated that this process is already underway - in particular, in the operating system segment, four out of almost 40 remain.

But at the same time, as independent expert Anton Zhbankov reminded, there are very few people who know how to build infrastructure based on Russian products, not only software, but also hardware. Moreover, according to his assessment, a more serious problem is the shortage of blue-collar personnel rather than specialists with higher education. The participants in the discussion came to the conclusion that companies will solve the problem of personnel shortage within themselves for the most part through retraining from related specialties.