Interview of TAdviser with the director of the department of IT outsourcing of ALP Group Dmitry Bessoltsev

Dmitry Bessoltsev: These innovations are caused by changes in the market which were shown at the end of 2014 and especially amplified in 2015-2016. It is important to understand accurately: these changes — system, they just will not manage to be waited. Respectively, the IT companies it is vital to change together with the market, to work for advancing. It is rather difficult to predict changes of IT market, today they are created at once by a set of trends, some of which develop in the general vector which is unidirectionally influencing the market, and others act in opposite directions. Some are the general for all market, others have industry character. Retailers, for example, traditionally were conservative players in the automation market – at least in all that concerns service contracts which were signed for the years ahead and acted without changes. In crisis product retail lost about 15% of turnover, many buyers went to online, preferring to hypermarkets convenience stores. Thus, the economic situation for retail cardinally worsened. As a result retailers from the most passive players in IT market turned into the most active. Today the trading companies aim to reduce idle times, to implement IT projects cheaper, but to save at the same time quality. And also to differentiate conditions of service contracts depending on the region and even features of specific outlets.

Respectively, representatives of retail began to demand from the IT service providers more flexible model both pricings, and the service. For large IT suppliers who long time serviced network retailers it became a call as they not always have due flexibility. Some suppliers could answer quickly new calls, and others — are not present. And retail addressed not such big, but more flexible players of the market of IT services which used a situation with benefit for themselves, among them — our company.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: It depends on the specific company, scales of its business and priorities of development. Global network retailers are able to afford at the same time both to reduce costs and to implement innovations like monitoring of movements of buyers on a trading floor by means of tracking of their mobile devices. Or, say, granting to the buyer directly in a trading floor of an opportunity "configure" to itself a unique sports undershirt which will be delivered then to it to the house. But it is a little such projects.

And here the task of reducing costs of IT is universal, and there is it the companies of any scale of business today. In reduction of IT costs it is possible to select two subtasks. The first — decrease in direct costs of IT. The second — reduction of the indirect financial and reputation losses caused by idle times of IT systems and a retail store equipment due to quicker reaction on incidents which, I will note in retail is much bigger, than in other industries (80% of all IT requests of retail are incidents).

Dmitry Bessoltsev: Of course, the main trend is an import substitution. Speak about it much, however by inertia continue to concentrate attention on state regulation. But here all main decisions are already made. The main problem, in my opinion, already went to other plane, namely: in need to provide Open Source products so high-quality maintenance and technical support, as well as to commercial proprietary solutions. The possibility of application of Open Source in the IT solutions supporting primary activity of the organization will depend on it.

Powerfully devaluation of ruble and growth of cost of the western software and licenses connected with it influence the market, and not only a public sector and state corporations, reduction of budgets on IT. These changes develop the commercial organizations to which the regulatory base of import substitution does not extend towards the free software. At the same time, devaluation of ruble and reduction of budgets considerably complicate high-quality implementation and service of IT solutions. To conciliate them, it is necessary to do a lot of things in a new way.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: The client formulates the task so: automate the central office and/or a branch network. Or, say, to increase fault tolerance of IT infrastructure. And all this is in the conditions of strictly limited budget. But without decline in quality. Rather difficult and versatile complex of technical and organizational measures among which I will especially note deep reorientation to the free software allowed to give the adequate answer to such requests of the market to us (Open Source, Open Source). It began in our department six years ago — on internal projects. And today on Open Source the key systems on which ALP Group business relies are constructed. We typed many cones. But the experience gained by expensive price led to the fact that by this moment we brought to the market the new service providing high-quality implementation and support of Open Source-solutions — on the basis of so tough SLA, as well as in usual western products. And as a result the customer for the first time had an opportunity to rely on Open Source, to manage normally costs and risks.

It equally concerns also project orderers of import substitution, and to quite typical situation when the commercial organization (we will tell, the "1C as service" providing to the clients service) transfers the IT infrastructure to Open Source to save on licenses. And their cost (in case of the commercial software) can be 75-90% of revenue for service!

Today clients are ready to be reconciled with longer implementation of Open Source and even with the bigger cost of works, expecting economy on licenses. But they cannot be reconciled with low quality of IT support. The lowered or unreliably fulfilled SLA is simply inadmissible neither in a case with suppliers of 1C SaaS services, nor at migration on free DBMS of production company where accounting, tax and management accounting based on software of 1C is automated. Well understanding it, we built a three-component system on support of Open Source products ("technology-people-processes"). And it, I will repeat, provides for Open Source the same high level of support, as in case of the commercial software. This service is very popular by the market.

One more example — economic implementation of fault tolerance of information systems due to transition of clients to hybrid IT infrastructure. Here in addition to own platform capacities from an external cloud are as required rented. The relevant service is available for us too, and it is popular too, especially from service companies with a large number of clients and changeable loading. In combination with fault tolerance the client receives scalability and stability. Today it is also necessary, any activity critically depends on IT.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: Computing powers – ours, and engineering infrastructure of DPC we rent at DataLine. Within rendering service of hybrid failsafe IT infrastructure we cooperate also with some other commercial DPCs.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: We relied on two long-term developments. The first – our technology allowing to provide at the same time to customers a set of implementations of the same IT processes. For example, the optimal control algorithm will be incidents absolutely different depending on the sizes of the customer, level of an IT maturity of the central office and regional divisions, features of the industry, and now also the nature of software — proprietary western, domestic or open. Both high-quality service of import-substituting solutions, and successful work with pharmaceutics and retail relies on this technology. To this ability we came as a result of a long way — from the first practical practices to construction of a multidimensional matrix of mature IT processes on the basis of ITIL.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: Yes, and in multiple implementation, taking into account features of the industry, scale of business and level of an IT maturity of customers and also the nature of the applied software (western, domestic or Open Source). The main principle at implementation of ITIL – adopt and adapt, i.e. ability is not simple to adopt the principles of the organization of processes, but also to adapt them for specific implementation, to improve processes under needs of the customer. In particular, it means that it is impossible to offer the client IT processes "not by the size" – which will be for it too primitive and will not solve its problem or, on the contrary, will be excessive at the current level of an IT maturity of the client.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: The second strength of our company is the direction of development of Open Source or Open Source which is already mentioned above. As I already spoke, we systemically use the free software for internal needs more than 6 years: the solution Zabbix as a monitoring system, Asterisk for telephony, nginx for balancing of load of web services and applications and also other free products. And we apply Open Source in IT solutions, crucial for our business.

I will note, as now to implement these products not easy, and six years ago they were at absolutely other level of development. Looking back, I can tell that here we passed a difficult way, overcame a set of organizational technical issues, learned to interact with community Open Source. Also understood that customers, trying to pass to Open Source, will inevitably face the same problems regarding implementation and support. From this there was also an idea of service for commercial support of free software products. At the same time we in essential degree independently finished the majority of free solutions which we propose to the customer (for example, in VyOS is an authentication using the Kerberos and ADFS, VPN IKEv2 protocols).

Dmitry Bessoltsev: STsMK is the service of the centralized monitoring and control allowing to pass from response to incidents to their prevention, i.e. to pro-activity. This service relies on the platform of monitoring Zabbix in which completion we, by the way, too made a certain contribution (for example, created Argus – the solution facilitating monitoring and control over distributed infrastructures. Argus visualizes information on the interactive map of the country, conducts deep monitoring, for example, HyperV and MS SQL, controls observance by IT service of the client of our recommendations and best practice on setup of applications, unloads engineers regarding installations and updates of agents, monitors efficiency of use of resources, etc.). Any company can implement Zabbix or a similar system and will begin to receive huge information volumes about health of the IT infrastructure. All question in how these data are used.

The main thing in STsMK service that data of monitoring are analyzed in real time by the crew of highly skilled professionals of a different profile selected to the customer: system administrators, analysts, etc. Using the tools developed by us, they timely detect anomalies in work of IT infrastructure, reveal the forming problems, set their reasons, select corrective actions and perform them through our regional partner or through the employee of IT department of the client. I.e. STsMK works as the situational center controlling a status of a specific IT system or all IT infrastructure of the customer.

As I already spoke, in STsMK the team of specialists works with incidents proactively, i.e. aims not to allow their emergence. And IT process (for example, incident management) is always response to the happened failure. Each incident has a lifecycle, from the emergence moment before liquidation. The it is shorter (under the terms of SLA), the it is less than time at IT specialists, the cost of such service contract is higher. But if business needs to reduce even more time of liquidation of incidents and to toughen SLA (because of increase of losses from idle times), then the threshold behind which IT process becomes too expensive will be surely reached. It is necessary either stop and be reconciled with idle times or to pass to pro-active solutions. But IT processes and STsMK can be used and at the same time: in change periods of IT infrastructure or, for example, in seasonal peaks of sales when the idle time price repeatedly increases.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: The service is absolutely new. Until recently it took place the testing period at limited number of customers, but several large customers among whom the multifilial organizations of the All-Russian scale were already connected to STsMK (40-100+ of branches). Besides, we began to provide in the pilot mode this service to some companies from a segment of SMB to estimate its market perspectives at the small organizations.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: This service solves exclusively essential problem — as it is correct to geographically distributed enterprise to select the SLA level, having eliminated a contradiction between high quality of IT service and need to reduce costs on it. Uniform SLA not always allows to make it: some divisions of the geographically distributed company or retail chain stores can overpay for unnecessary service whereas not enough selected level is another considerably. It is clear, that it is necessary to differentiate SLA, having tied its rigidity to actual demands of separate divisions. But these requirements should be revealed, and not once since the situation in shops and branches changes in time. And at each change it is necessary to carry out reconfiguration in service company and its partner network. The differentiated SLA is too expensive if number, a variety and variability of requirements of territorial units are high. Smart SLA allows to cope with this problem at the expense of a categorization of territorial units and process optimization of their primary and repeated reference to the corresponding classes ("And", "In", "With", etc.). But for the outsourcing company is quite difficult technology.

The market in general and retail in particular was apprehended by Smarts SLA very positively. It appeared recently, but on it there is already a high demand. Moreover, in the majority of projects in retail and some other segments we already apply or we are going to apply this or that Smart SLA form. This very perspective direction.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: Very naturally. I consider that a key to success of import substitution are the IT processes, optimal for the customer, considering features of Open Source, tough SLA (including Smart) plus services of pro-active prevention of problems. It is a complete formula. Delete any element – and the customer, having passed to Open Source, will surely face high risks, big costs or impossibility to solve a certain category of the tasks obligatory for IT systems which support primary activity of the organization.

Dmitry Bessoltsev: In structure of the company two main directions – implementation (about 200 specialists) and service are selected (about 200 more). In regions we work with retail through our partner network - it is about 250 companies, and in service division separate business process on management of a partner network and its development taking into account all innovations about which I spoke is built. The most profitable is the traditional direction of implementation and the accompanying consulting, a margin in the service direction average on the market – about 15%, but advantages of rendering IT services that at rather small income, receipts go steadily. We do not increase marginality though Smarts SLA, STsMK and some other our services have no analogs in modern IT market. We are attracted more by increase in number of projects and expansion of the market.