Anastasia Sokolova, Director of the Marketing Department of Merlion Group, shared her opinion with the editors of IT Channel News.
Edition: IT Channel News
The end of the year is the time when everyone actively discusses market trends and plans for the next year. Here, for example, are the global forecasts by IDC and Gartner for the foreseeable future.
We are definitely not going to talk about the plans as they, to put it mildly, are not always implemented... But it is interesting to find out the opinions of leading players in the Russian IT market about how applicable global trends are to us now.
Will we go our own way again? Or will the Russian IT market develop mainly in accordance with global trends by showing certain unique features? Which ones are relevant to us, and which ones are not? What trends are due to the current state of affairs in our country and are characteristic exclusively of the Russian IT market?
We invited the winners of “25 best Russian system integrators 2022”and “Best Russian IT distributors 2021” (in the nomination “Distributor for the integrator”) to participate in this review.
The participants of the review include Anastasia Sokolova, Director of the Marketing Department in Merlion Group:
The main trend of the Russian IT market in 2023 is the promotion of software by domestic manufacturers. If you expect any influence of global trends, it will be minimal. By autumn, it became obvious that the withdrawal of foreign vendors seriously complicated the support of long-supplied and implemented foreign solutions in the short term - not only from the point of view of ensuring security but also in terms of preserving their efficiency.
The promotion of Russian software is much more relevant today than the transition to domestic hardware: in the pandemic years characterized by difficulties with equipment supplies, many customers made considerable reserves for several years ahead, while the complete disconnection of support for foreign system and application software (which was the basis not only for business but also for state educational institutions, health care, and even authorities for decades) is a serious concern. In the absence of vendor updates, it is not only security that suffers. Uncorrected errors accumulate to reach a critical mass that influences the performance of software solutions. If we have no vendor support, no one can guarantee the supply of all the required updates and the absence of software blocking functions based on geography.
And while the situation is now relatively good with regard to system solutions (we have operating systems, virtualization systems, DBMS, and enterprise-level backup systems), the market of applications is having hard times. This is especially true of various industrial solutions and development tools, ECP and ERP systems, which were in principle developed exclusively for the Windows platform. It is worth noting that even educational institutions cannot completely abandon foreign solutions and replace them with available domestic office packages. So, the transition to domestic software is not just an obvious trend in 2023 but an inevitable thing. The accelerated process of domestic developers' consolidation allows us to hope for a reduction in the number of offers and the emergence of more mature solutions instead of many simple and similar ones. And here we see the increasing importance of the role of distributors and system integrators who can provide qualified assistance in the selection and implementation of software that best meets the requirements of customers.
As for hardware, the process will span for at least five years: even with the presence of competitive developments, the lack of own microprocessor production on the modern level impedes the development of computing and network equipment. In the foreseeable future, it will not be possible to abandon the import of hardware, and we will have to agree to long delivery times. And, moreover, the software remains the main problem here: it is no secret that even the solutions included in the domestic software provide only formal support for the work on processors by Russian developers and do not provide the performance that they show using foreign chips. Therefore, the Russian IT trend in 2023 is undoubtedly the promotion of domestic software.
Source: IT Channel News.
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