What The International IT Market Grands Have Done For Russia?

Kommersant # 161, 01.09.2004

Aleksey Ananyin, General Director of «Borlas Group»:
They gave ready-made solutions, products, work places and investments to the IT market. Market management technologies both as IT tools for business and the experience of business organization and conducting to the market on the whole. IT companies have first of all learned marketing, bringing the high-tech developments to a product and the product to a consumer from them. Having set a rather high bar, they created the motivation for the national IT companies’ growth and development. However their marketing power and absence of the Russian manufacturers ready to invest made our market accept the technologies that are not always more technologically advanced than the home developments. The international IT grand have «absorbed» a part of our intellectual resources. As a result, now we are strong only in programming and consulting, i. e. in brains, and unfortunately are not able to meet competition in other areas.

Tagir Yapparov, President of «IT»:
First of all they helped to form a market similar to American and European ones in structure. This is a great thing, as we haven’t and won’t have many operation systems. At the same time it’s obvious that the balance on this market has notably changed in favor of the biggest international companies and Russia appeared to be like one of the local markets, which has its own application products for local needs and consumes the global products. Thus Russian companies are able to occupy just the local product niche.

Andrey Morozov, President of CBOSS Association:
As the Russian IT developer, I would like to remark the international grands influence firstly on development of the information technologies production in Russia. International grands influence two-ways: on the one hand they contribute to development of the information technologies production in Russia, on the other hand they prevent it. To understand this illusory contradiction, it is necessary to divide information technologies in two classes: instrumental and applied. There are instrumental technologies that are now meaningless to produce in Russia independently. But to build a complete applied solution on the instrumental platform of the leading international producers is quite an honorable and solvable task. Thus, the grads of international IT industry that offer access to their instrumental tools, contribute much to the information technologies development in Russia. While those that choose to promote their complete solutions on the Russian market, which are often expensive, complicated, clumsy, objectively prevent this development.

Felix Glikman, General Director of the TopS Business Integrator:
Firstly, international IT market grand introduce the latest products and technologies in Russia. Secondly, the international IT industry giants brought civilized business traditions to Russia. Russian IT companies during their formation were for the most part engineering, their owners and directors had not enough knowledge and management experience, so this area was mostly mastered in cooperation with vendors, in communication with international managers and Russian specialists who had the western-school experience.

Sergey Kalinin, President of the «Open Technologies»:
They brought high-grade production made beyond the scope of the Defense complex. The foreign producers experience has shown us that this is possible. Besides, the foreign companies also introduced some methodical information enabling the effective implementation of technologies.
It’s worth to admit though, that appearance of international grands on our market made the development of post-soviet electronic industry impossible. This is our objectiveу reality and it’s necessary to learn building the new home IT market in it. But I believe in new birth of our native computer engineering school that will happen, to my mind, in the nearest decade.

Mikhail Krasnov: President of Verysell Association:
The international IT companies have performed a very important culture-trigger function, I mean training the qualified personnel for Russian companies. IT market is global by its nature, and the specialists from western companies gradually transfer to the Russian ones and vice versa. As a result, the quality of Russian IT companies’ management has remarkably improved up to the international standard.