Ilya Panteleev: Whether there is a place to ERP fatalism in Darvinian economy?

Ilya Panteleev: The market of ERP that in the world that in Russia is mature market, with the settled models of consumer behavior, the settled shares of the consulting companies and vendors. Basic changes do not happen any more. The small flank "fights" which do not have a serious impact on an overall picture are going. And at the same time, we are at a turn of a new era of information systems for business. An era, when each company is able to select for itself as bricks of the designer of Lego, key business processes of a cloud and to build of them the system reflecting identity and unique competitive advantages of this company. Certainly, there will be standardized "sets of automation" standard for this type of business or the industry of processes, and still ahead we have a development towards the ERP systems maintaining uniqueness of the companies giving them force in their key advantage.

Of course, until such standard platforms and services we still should wait. And, perhaps, even not year and not three, and much more. And nevertheless every day we move to this future.

If to consider shorter prospect in 3-5 years and in Russia, then the key factor is the level of openness of the Russian economy. The more the country is guided by growth of competitiveness of the goods and the companies in the world, competes with other companies and the countries for love of consumers, the requirements to efficiency are higher, demand for the solutions increasing the volume of add-value of products and services is higher. In competitive markets win against the companies capable to adapt quickly to external changes. And the companies which learned and capable to independently cause these changes have a bigger force.

Open competition forces the companies to work as a uniform organism where ERP is the nervous system which is responsible for integration, adaptation and reaction of all bodies to external and internal influences. And, as well as in nervous system, the bodies deprived of similar "feed" from nervous cages atrophy and can die off.

TAdviser: Whether it is worth investing in ERP projects, especially today taking into account that "corpulent" years passed and ahead, according to forecasts of economists, we are waited by several years of the economic plateau?

Ilya Panteleev: Economic stagnation is time of the increased death rate. Only the most sensitive survive, fast, flexible. Stagnation is much more difficult for the companies, than growth or crisis falling. Russia for the last 20 years had no such experience. We as the country, are not ready. For this reason it is important to manage to make the organization adaptive, to ensure dynamism and effective functioning of her nervous system to manage to monitor threats and opportunities in the world around and it is correct to react to them. It would be possible to tell that that who now still has no ERP – that goner, but it would be the lie. The leader the one who could organize a company performance as a uniform purposeful organism. At someone, perhaps, a part of tasks is solved "in the old manner", with "props" - then time to replace props with the industrial systems came.

The question of investments is not connected with crisis or not crisis situations. We live in conditions of the strongest unpredictability. Any crisis was not predicted though backdating, of course, all of them were explained. Business systems change not linearly, we still poorly can predict events which will happen to small probability. Therefore each business solution needs to be estimated not only in terms of the probability of effects, but also in terms of the maximum business damage which can happen as a result of its acceptance or rejection. Otherwise we will continue to come up against situations when after decision-making we receive high-probable, but small marginal income, and then there is a fatal situation eating all got profit and even even more. It is important to take potential fatal effect which can be received as a result of the wrong solution into account.

In my opinion, it is necessary to invest and develop business always because differently business stops. And any stop leads to collapse after a while. Another thing is that it is important to select the key directions for investment and not to spray investment resources in a large number of the directions. Otherwise probability is very high that in the correct changes you do not doinvestirut, respectively, do not gain the correct effect, and in wrong you will give a resource, the effect of which will not be by determination. Therefore it is necessary to select strategic changes and to invest only in them. It sounds, on the one hand, is banal. And on the other hand, it is always difficult to make a choice.

It is always necessary to be ready to changes. Only if the company is ready and is able to change, it has chances to remain the leader in this world. If the company is static, it loses speed and begins to lose in this race. The stablest place, as we know, at the cemetery. From this point of view, an opportunity to change, desire to change is the most important. Not remain static and not rest on laurels is one of the major qualities which allows to survive and be in the lead in Darvinian economy.

TAdviser: What solutions are most demanded now?

Ilya Panteleev: ERP systems should help people and to the companies quickly to react to changes in economy and a business environment, to change together with the world or maybe quicker it. On solutions which can really help with it demand is, and big.

Practically in all sectors of economy it is already not enough to think up, create and begin to sell a successful product actively. Now to all other, it is necessary to learn to generate quickly the successful ideas, "put them on a flow", understanding that tomorrow any idea will be copied, will finish, will overtake. Therefore a key factor of success for any head and any company – ability to live and succeed in a flow of continuously accruing changes. And, in particular, business applications should help to find, invent, implement these changes too.

Russia completely corresponds to trends of the global demand. It is possible to tell firmly that demand for cloud applicaions, mobile, finance solutions focused on planning and the analysis of fast project business models, CRM- and a SCM system ripened.

TAdviser: What can you call key achievements of the company in 2013?

Ilya Panteleev: First of all, we passed a phase of consolidation consulting the practician of two companies: in 2013 consulting practicians of AND Project and TOPS Business Integrator companies integrated. It was the difficult task. Two big labor collectives, with different cultures, did huge work that the company worked as a unit with different experience. At the same time it is worth to remember that both companies constantly worked, the personnel were seriously loaded, i.e., in fact, it were two rapidly moving engines. We had a task on the run to link them together, not to lose speed, not to lose identity of these or those the practician. It is very important, in identity the practician, approaches to business key competitive advantages lie. I am very glad that we managed it: integration took place successfully both in the emotional plan, and in terms of financial results, quality of work and satisfaction of customers.

TAdviser: What plans of the company for the near future?

Ilya Panteleev: We always aim to increase efficiency existing the practician and to look for the additional solutions disruptive for the key industries, new "power sources". We actively develop and we look for solutions, for example, in clouds. At the same time we place emphasis and on our traditional products, such as: Microsoft Dynamics AX CRM, solutions made based on Oracle Hyperion Documentum and also custom development.

For example, if it is about such product as TOPS Future Workspace, the leading solution in the questions connected with communications and HR of the large distributed holdings – we continue to improve it. We integrated such products of Microsoft as Yammer into the solution, took out a part of the solution in a cloud, we develop mobile applications.

We use the combined strategy: we increase efficiency of our products to correspond more to customer needs, and we are in permanent search of disruptive solutions for the industries in which we either are leaders, or we are going to become them.