Can Russian software vendors take a leading position in the global market?
A round table under this title was collected by Vedomosti at the electronic breakthrough business forum held at the Infocom 2007 exhibition in Moscow. Its participants - heads of successful domestic software development companies and mixed solutions based on it - discussed the prospects and needs of the Russian software industry both in the domestic and foreign markets. In general, the discussion has come down to the rationale of why the answer to the title question is “Yes.” Nobody expressed any doubts that the answer was exactly that.
Oleg Biakhov, who had recently headed the Department of Information Society Development Strategy of the Ministry of Information Technologies and now engaged in consulting at IBM, felt well as a presenter. He skillfully collected the big picture from the presentations of the speakers and filled the pauses between them with stories from his own experience, including the canonical parable about how a very famous auditing company did not believe in young Bill Gates, which he later regretted.
The first with information about current successes and areas of work of the domestic software development industry took the floor president of the association " Russoft " Valentin Makarov. He said that today Russia has almost moved away from the practice of pure offshore programming and is increasingly supplying R & D services that are at a level higher than simple coding on the basis of the ready-made technical requirements that most outsourcing companies in India and China, our most serious competing countries, are engaged in. Given that in absolute terms in the volume of software exports, we are unlikely to ever be able to catch up with them (by 2010, Russia: India’s billions of dollars will be 6:60 here), we are already starting to move away from direct competition with them, climbing to the heights that are still inaccessible to them, taking on more complex and quality-sensitive projects. This is confirmed by the data from the IDC study, commissioned by Russoft in March (this study was mentioned more than once in the future).
Greatly similar to the exponent graph of growth of the very volume of software exports (among Hindus, such a graph, however, is even more like it), according to Makarov, this is a sure key to the success of the domestic manufacturer and at home. “We will not give up our market to anyone!” He finished.
Interesting fact: among the leading countries of software development, only in Russia, the state does not help its business at all. The creation of a special structure, which will be engaged in the promotion of our products abroad, has already “overripe”, this should have been done at least 5 years ago. However, in reality, the government will deal with this no sooner than in 7 years, when our software exports will already overtake imports (think about the significance of this event). We are still embarrassed to talk about some kind of unified state policy in this area, perhaps because of the fear of reviving the good old Gosplan. But the fact that this is the cornerstone for the development of the industry should be understood as soon as possible, says Auriga President Alexey Sukharev.
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The general director of the company " Quorum " complained that the tax benefits for software producers would be very appropriate, but the existing reliefs look frivolous. Given that 70-80% of the budget of such companies eats up the salary of highly skilled, and therefore expensive employees, preferential social tax would have a significant impact on costs. In addition, the trend of time, when foreign companies in our market are allowed more and more and they begin to seriously compete with ours in areas in which they used to feel like a stone wall (for example, software in the banking sector), should not turn into extremes . Healthy protection has never harmed anyone.
Another problem that cannot do without state intervention is the acute shortage of qualified personnel in the teaching staff of technological universities. Practically all of them today produce the same coders, almost not satisfying the need for design engineers, system architects and, as already mentioned by Spirit Sales Director Vyacheslav Borilin, marketing specialists.
Without the ability to sell a ready-made, even the most wonderful and perfect product, no business is possible. And if a company whose software runs on every iPod and iPhone, and along with them in millions and millions of other devices from more than 200 manufacturers, speaks about the lack of competent vendors, then the problem is really acute! The picture of marketing costs is also indicative: in the USA, where the culture of mass advertising is already good for 100 years, the cost of per capita per year is $ 600, while in Russia it is only $ 30. And the road to the indicators of the US, we still have to go. Entirely, there are no cuts anywhere.
Noticing that a sharp jump for Russian manufacturers is possible in the event of a change in the market paradigm, when the one who first has time to understand the essence of the changes that have won (no, nanotechnology has nothing to do with it) wins. The CEO of Red Soft , Vadim Shchepinov, sees such a shift in the transition to open source software, which removes all the problems with intellectual property, which in modern business has become a very formidable weapon that “big” crush on “little ones”. This idea was widely recognized as very interesting.
In the final communication with the hall, it also became clear that technoparks in Russian are an absurd invention, which only complicates life for the residents due to the subtleties of tax legislation, which gives privileges only to workers hired in the technopark territory (the meaning of the word “hired” is interpreted, of course, not in favor of business).
Summing up, we can conclude that finally, the wishes of the government in the spirit of "do what you want, just do not interfere" big business is no longer slowly moving to the requirements to fulfill its obligations in the definition of government itself. And it pleases.
Oleg Biakhov, who had recently headed the Department of Information Society Development Strategy of the Ministry of Information Technologies and now engaged in consulting at IBM, felt well as a presenter. He skillfully collected the big picture from the presentations of the speakers and filled the pauses between them with stories from his own experience, including the canonical parable about how a very famous auditing company did not believe in young Bill Gates, which he later regretted.
The first with information about current successes and areas of work of the domestic software development industry took the floor president of the association " Russoft " Valentin Makarov. He said that today Russia has almost moved away from the practice of pure offshore programming and is increasingly supplying R & D services that are at a level higher than simple coding on the basis of the ready-made technical requirements that most outsourcing companies in India and China, our most serious competing countries, are engaged in. Given that in absolute terms in the volume of software exports, we are unlikely to ever be able to catch up with them (by 2010, Russia: India’s billions of dollars will be 6:60 here), we are already starting to move away from direct competition with them, climbing to the heights that are still inaccessible to them, taking on more complex and quality-sensitive projects. This is confirmed by the data from the IDC study, commissioned by Russoft in March (this study was mentioned more than once in the future).
Greatly similar to the exponent graph of growth of the very volume of software exports (among Hindus, such a graph, however, is even more like it), according to Makarov, this is a sure key to the success of the domestic manufacturer and at home. “We will not give up our market to anyone!” He finished.
Interesting fact: among the leading countries of software development, only in Russia, the state does not help its business at all. The creation of a special structure, which will be engaged in the promotion of our products abroad, has already “overripe”, this should have been done at least 5 years ago. However, in reality, the government will deal with this no sooner than in 7 years, when our software exports will already overtake imports (think about the significance of this event). We are still embarrassed to talk about some kind of unified state policy in this area, perhaps because of the fear of reviving the good old Gosplan. But the fact that this is the cornerstone for the development of the industry should be understood as soon as possible, says Auriga President Alexey Sukharev.
')
The general director of the company " Quorum " complained that the tax benefits for software producers would be very appropriate, but the existing reliefs look frivolous. Given that 70-80% of the budget of such companies eats up the salary of highly skilled, and therefore expensive employees, preferential social tax would have a significant impact on costs. In addition, the trend of time, when foreign companies in our market are allowed more and more and they begin to seriously compete with ours in areas in which they used to feel like a stone wall (for example, software in the banking sector), should not turn into extremes . Healthy protection has never harmed anyone.
Another problem that cannot do without state intervention is the acute shortage of qualified personnel in the teaching staff of technological universities. Practically all of them today produce the same coders, almost not satisfying the need for design engineers, system architects and, as already mentioned by Spirit Sales Director Vyacheslav Borilin, marketing specialists.
Without the ability to sell a ready-made, even the most wonderful and perfect product, no business is possible. And if a company whose software runs on every iPod and iPhone, and along with them in millions and millions of other devices from more than 200 manufacturers, speaks about the lack of competent vendors, then the problem is really acute! The picture of marketing costs is also indicative: in the USA, where the culture of mass advertising is already good for 100 years, the cost of per capita per year is $ 600, while in Russia it is only $ 30. And the road to the indicators of the US, we still have to go. Entirely, there are no cuts anywhere.
Noticing that a sharp jump for Russian manufacturers is possible in the event of a change in the market paradigm, when the one who first has time to understand the essence of the changes that have won (no, nanotechnology has nothing to do with it) wins. The CEO of Red Soft , Vadim Shchepinov, sees such a shift in the transition to open source software, which removes all the problems with intellectual property, which in modern business has become a very formidable weapon that “big” crush on “little ones”. This idea was widely recognized as very interesting.
In the final communication with the hall, it also became clear that technoparks in Russian are an absurd invention, which only complicates life for the residents due to the subtleties of tax legislation, which gives privileges only to workers hired in the technopark territory (the meaning of the word “hired” is interpreted, of course, not in favor of business).
Summing up, we can conclude that finally, the wishes of the government in the spirit of "do what you want, just do not interfere" big business is no longer slowly moving to the requirements to fulfill its obligations in the definition of government itself. And it pleases.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/15391/
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