Interview of TAdviser with the CEO of FORS group company Stepan Tomlyanovich

Stepan Tomlyanovich: First of all - noticeable revival on many activities in the field of IT. It is a trend which pleases all participants of IT market. Against the background of falling in 2015 on average for 30-40% and last year's stagnation we expect small growth by the end of 2017. At the same time on the most perspective segments growth by 10-20% and more is probable.

The reasons for careful optimism are: the last years most the companies taught not only to survive, but also to develop in present adverse conditions. Despite the lack of economic growth, the general orientation to cost reduction, gradual return to investment projects, including to upgrade of IT infrastructure was outlined.

Fast distribution of cloud model promises to create in the next years a flow of the stable, constantly growing income for the leading suppliers of IT services. We think that now there comes time of monetization of all that is made by the IT companies in a segment of clouds. Use of cloud services allows customers to avoid long-term investments that in the current conditions gives serious competitive advantages.

In general we expect acceleration of digital transformation of the Russian business and public sector that means the advancing development of such directions as "mobilization" of IT solutions, use (Big_Data) _в_России#.2A.D0.A1.D0.BE.D1.81.D1.82.D0.BE.D1.8F.D0.BD.D0.B8.D0.B5_.D1.80.D0.BE.D1.81.D1.81.D0.B8.D0.B9.D1.81.D0.BA.D0.BE.D0.B3.D0.BE_.D1.80.D1.8B.D0.BD.D0.BA.D0.B0_Big_Data Big Data, Internet of Things. The growing competition demands from customers of high-quality change of the IT infrastructure, implementation of the new advanced systems.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: In digital economy interaction of all participants of process of creation of a product or service, as well as interaction with their consumers, is performed by means of digital technologies. Leaving of a considerable part of internal and external business processes of the company "in digit" creates essentially new opportunities for business. Many times the efficiency and flexibility increases, significant savings of resources are reached, the risk of "a human factor" is minimized, the transparency and predictability increases.

Lag of Russia from the leading countries of "digitalization" makes 5-8 years and, unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude that this gap will increase further. To break a situation, focus should be made on growth of investments of private and public sector as in basic components of digital economy – "cloud" infrastructure and Internet commerce, and in the solutions supporting digital transformation of the enterprises including using Internet of Things, Big Data, artificial intelligence.

The Russian IT companies save possibilities of creation in a number of segments of "digital" products and services with the high export potential. One of global trends in which we can participate too – telemedicine. Unfortunately, for its development in our country still there is no legal framework, but work on this direction was sped up recently.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: First of all, to understand the market (ecosystem), to formulate business objectives and criteria of their achievement, to estimate ROI and TCO of the technologies planned to application, to analyze readiness of personnel, customers and also the management and shareholders of the company. Often, exactly this factor becomes a stumbling block. Of course, without IT of a component digital transformation is impossible, but setting and the realization of tasks should be enabled together with business, on its initiative.

One of the first tasks which arises practically in any project on digital transformation is connected with formation of data sources. She does not come down to purely technology collecting and approval of data, and demands the deep analysis and a research of information. In order that data became a digital asset, new methods of their use which would match market requirement should be found and allowed to create a new product or service. For this purpose it is necessary to involve specialists in data slicing pane - Data Scientists which know how to work with data, own mathematical and statistical techniques and at the same time understand data domain.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: Financial results on FORS group it is significantly better last year's. Against the background of stagnation of IT market at the end of 2016 we showed height of 18.5%. Revenue exceeded 9 billion rubles. The greatest dynamics was shown by the service direction – the share of technical support and maintenance of software in structure of revenue made more than 50%. Besides, at us the share of delivery services of the equipment and software within the projects executed by us – significantly grew to 20%. The basis of business of the company is formed, as before, by software development and IT consulting (on a gross revenue it is totally about 30%). We see demand for systems for data management as an asset, the systems of a business intelligence, service of audit and consulting on optimization of IT infrastructure.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: We think that exactly thanks to the fact that already 25 years our priorities remain invariable, we manage to save stable growth rates. Our strength is an application development on the platform Oracle, examination in the field of products and technologies of this vendor therefore we also can provide the level of technical support so high professionally. We have over 25 specializations of Oracle, and we try to be one of the first in the market who proposes the latest solutions and services on the basis of these technologies. So was with Big Data and so, we hope, will be with cloud services of Oracle PaaS and IaaS by delivery of Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine and Oracle Cloud Machine. Now the cloud direction for us is the main point of growth as, actually, delivering solutions will be followed by the whole range of new services.

One more point of growth – informatization of medicine. The group of FORS does a lot of things in this direction. The number of projects in the field of commercial health care, and grows in the most different areas – from end-to-end medical information systems to budgeting systems and telemonitoring.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: The greatest share of revenue is the share of government institutions and the financial sector. Also the share of a telecom, retail, power and housing and public utilities is noticeable. For example, implementation in Sportmaster group of EDMS on the basis of the Oracle BPM Suite platform became one of the brightest projects of last year. The project continues to develop and today.

One of our trunk tasks – active work with regions. So, in Tula project implementation on creation of "A regional e-government system of Tula region" (RSEP) continues that assumes significant expansion of basic functionality and connection of add-on modules and components. In Khanty-Mansiysk we develop and we upgrade the register of state services - it is also our own development.

We see good perspectives for promotion in regions of the solution on full automation of activity of the state housing inspectorate (the AIS Inspection) – from formation of the plan of checks before case referral to archive after payment of a penalty.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: The FORS from the very beginning actively participated in the Moscow program "Electronic City". We developed the whole line of solutions for management of the city and automation of different spheres of city life. Among them it is possible to select a management system for municipal economy, a system of accounting of objects of road and transport infrastructure, a monitoring system of moving objects in municipal economy using GLONASS and some other. All these solutions can be replicated also in other cities.

Last year we successfully implemented a number of solutions in the field of automation of medicine, including and on "free" software. So, the Ay-FORS company entering into FORS group recently successfully brought into commercial operation the system of telecondition monitoring of health of patients of RemsMed in the European medical center (EMC) in Moscow. For colleagues from "Ah-by FORS" it not the first implementation – the similar solution is already used in the First MGMU of I.M. Sechenov.

It is possible to note 2 more new products – the FORSMedia system for data analysis from social networks and a packet of cloud services of FORSOnline for process automation of budgeting, planning and enterprise performance management.

Stepan Tomlyanovich: Yes, we already do it. The direction of cloud services, system integration, development of solutions on the basis of technologies of Big Data, creation of mobile versions of own software products – all this the perspective investment directions from which we hope to receive return in the next years. Separately it would be desirable to select development for Open Source, in particular, on PostgreSQL and transfer to this platform of the applied systems of customers. Recently this service is especially demanded. In the industry relation the sport and medicine are still interesting to us - it is those areas where the market not only is capacious, but also it is ready to changes by means of IT. And we can propose the ready-made approved solutions using the latest technologies already now.