Sovereign clouds

The Russian market of cloud services in terms of money hardly accounts for one percent of total cloud revenues in the world. Nevertheless, periodically there are international players who declare their desire to fight for a place under the Russian sun. What to expect in 2019? Under the cat the opinion of Konstantin Anisimov, CEO Rusonyx .



In 2019, the Dutch Leaseweb announced the desire to provide in Russia services of public and private clouds, dedicated servers, collocation, information content network (CDN) and information security. And this despite the presence of the largest international players here (Alibaba, Huawei and IBM).

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In 2018, the Russian cloud services market grew by 25% compared with 2017 and reached 68.4 billion rubles. The volume of the IaaS market (“infrastructure as a service”) according to various sources ranged from 12 to 16 billion rubles. In 2019, indicators can be at the level of 15 to 20 billion rubles. Given that the volume of the global IaaS market in 2018 amounted to about $ 30 billion. Of these, almost half of the revenue comes from Amazon. Another 25% is occupied by the world's largest players (Google, Microsoft, IBM and Alibaba). The remaining share falls on independent international players.

The future begins today

How promising is the cloud direction in Russian realities, and how is it able to help or prevent state protectionism? For example, you can require state-owned companies to completely abandon the import software solutions and equipment. On the other hand, such restrictions prevent competition and place state-owned companies in obviously unequal conditions with commercial structures. Today, especially in Fintech, they compete on the level of technologies. And if, for example, state-owned banks will have to choose not the best technological solutions, but only those that have a Russian residence permit, any competing commercial bank will only have to clap their hands and watch how miraculously the market share is won by itself.



According to iKS-Consulting, the Russian cloud services market in the coming years will grow by an average of 23% per year and may reach 155 billion rubles in 2022. Moreover, we not only import, but also export cloud services. The share of foreign customers in the revenues of domestic cloud providers is 5.1%, or 2.4 billion rubles, in the SaaS segment. Revenue in the Infrastructure as a Service segment (IaaS, servers, data warehouses, networks, operating systems in the cloud that customers use to deploy and run their own software solutions) to foreign customers last year accounted for 2.2%, or 380 million rubles.



Actually, we have two multidirectional concepts for the development of the Russian cloud services market. On the one hand, isolationism and the course of full import substitution of external services, and on the other, an open market and ambitions to conquer the world. Which of the strategies in Russia has the greatest prospects? I do not want to think that only the first.

What are the arguments of supporters of dense "digital fences"? National security, protection of the domestic market from international expansion and support of key local players. Everybody has an example of China with Alibaba Cloud. The state makes a lot of effort to ensure that local guys remain in their own country without competition.



However, Chinese companies are not limited to internal ambitions, and their experience shows that this is the most optimal strategy. Today, Alibaba cloud is the third in the world. Moreover, the Chinese are full of ambitions to remove Amazon and Microsoft from their pedestals. In fact, we are seeing the emergence of the “big cloud three”.

Russia in the clouds

What are the chances of Russia seriously and permanently appear on the world cloud map? There are many talented programmers and companies capable of offering a competitive product in the country. New players with serious ambitions, such as Rostelecom, Yandex and Mail.ru, with decent technological potential, have recently joined the “cloud” race. And I expect a real battle, of course, not between the clouds as such, but between ecosystems. And here not only basic IaaS services will come to the forefront, but new generations of cloud services - microservices, edge computing and serverless. After all, the basic IaaS service has already become practically “commodity” and only numerous additional cloud services will allow you to tightly bind the user to yourself. And the field of this future battle is the Internet of things, smart cities and smart, and in the near future already unmanned cars.







What competitive advantages can Russian companies offer and do they have a prospect? If we consider that the Russian market, one of the few in the world that has not surrendered under the pressure of Google and Amazon, then I believe that there are chances. Perhaps one of the best price / quality ratios of our education in the world, our proximity to Western culture, the accumulated experience of doing business, including international (after 30 years ago there was no such experience in principle), the emerging experience of creating world-class IT products (AmoCRM, Bitrix24, Veeam, Acronis, Dodo, Tinkoff, Cognitive - they are no longer so few) - all these are the advantages that can help us in global competition. And the recent agreement between Yandex and Hyundai Motors on cooperation in the field of unmanned cars only adds confidence that Russian companies can and should fight for a significant piece of the global cloud “cake”.



The situation with the "landing" of global IT services in accordance with the requirements of national legislation plays into the hands of Russian companies. National governments are not at all enthusiastic about the dominance of American services in their territories, and last year’s record $ 5 billion fine towards Google in Europe is a clear confirmation of this. The European GDPR or the Russian “Law on the storage of personal data”, for example, now imposes quite clear requirements for the storage location of user data. This means that local services have certain preferences and even relatively small players will be able to compete with global companies due to their flexibility, partnership ability, adaptability and speed. The main thing is to set ourselves such tasks, to have ambitions not only endlessly “defend” against global competition, but also actively participate in it.

What do I personally expect from the cloud services market in Russia and in Europe in 2019?

The most basic and primary is that we will continue to consolidate the market. And already from this fact, in fact, two trends follow.



First, technological. Consolidation will allow leading players to focus more on the development and implementation of new technologies in the clouds. In particular, my company is involved in the development of serverless computing technologies (serverless) and I know that in 2019 we will see quite a lot of such projects in various markets. The monopoly of the big three of Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the provision of serverless computing services will begin to crumble and in this, I hope, Russian players will take part.



The second, and perhaps even more important - consolidation sets an obvious clear course for the client, because the market leaders do it very well and, if you want to stay on the market, you must comply with its trends. A modern client needs not only technologically advanced cloud services, but also the quality of providing these same services. Therefore, projects that are able to find a balance between their profitability and the deepest interests of the customer have every chance to become successful. Personification, convenience and simplicity of the product - more and more play a key role. Cloud users want to understand what effect the service provides for his business, why he should do it and how to spend as little time and money as possible on it. The “backyard” of your product can be infinitely complex and technically advanced, but use should be as simple and inconspicuous as possible. Moreover, this trend is even in the "heavy" corporate services, where VMWare and other traditional guys ruled for a long time. Now they obviously have to make room. And it's good for the industry, and most importantly, for customers.