Aeroflot: It is more profitable to use solutions of Microsoft, than pass to Russian software

On March 28, 2018 the Russian airline "Aeroflot" summed up the results of large purchase of licenses of software products of Microsoft.^[1]

Aeroflot bought licenses of Microsoft almost for one billion rubles

Applications for participation in a procurement procedure of Aeroflot directed 4 companies - Comparex, I-Teco, Softline Trade and NVision Group. The offer of the last was rejected on the basis of its mismatch of documentation on purchase. In particular, it was specified that the place of order taking – electronic marketplace of Aeroflot, and requests which arrived for consideration of a tender committee otherwise are not subject to consideration.

Among the remained three participants the greatest number of points was received by Comparex company. It also became the winner. The total cost of the agreement will be 980.3 million rubles that honor less initial cost of purchase for 100 million rubles.

In total Aeroflot will obtain more than 37.5 thousand different licenses of the American software company. In particular, it is the non-exclusive rights on OS Windows and Windows Server, the platform Microsoft Azure, office suites Office 365, solutions for project management Project, building tools Visual Studio, DBMS SQL Server and other products.

Licenses for all deliverable solutions should work within 3 years, since April 1, 2018.

As justification of impossibility of observance of prohibition on acquisition of foreign software, the customer pointed to absence in the register of the Russian software of analogs required products with necessary functionality.

Acquisition of licenses of operating systems for jobs and servers is caused by need of the ensuring compatibility and operability of the application software used in primary activity of the company and having versions only for work running operating systems of Microsoft company. Similar explanations are given also for DBMS. As for office applications and also server and binding software, here Aeroflot refers to need of compatibility of processes and formats of document handling with the existing international standards since the company conducts the activity in the territory of more than 50 countries of the world and has respectively a significant amount of foreign partners.

Besides, according to explanations of airline, transfer of the operated applied information systems to use of software of domestic development is economically inexpedient and inefficient since it requires big time and finance costs incomparable to the cost of the license of Microsoft.

Screenshot from Microsoft.pdf of the document of Aeroflot

According to TAdviser, purchase of licenses of Microsoft by Aeroflot is the largest among similar state procurements in 2018. In 2017 there were some of very large acquisitions of software solutions of Microsoft. In the fall Sberbank carried out purchase of products of this American corporation almost for 4 billion rubles. In March, 2017 the Bank of Russia summed up the results of purchase of licenses of Microsoft for 3.35 billion rubles. In January of the same year more than 146 thousand licenses of Microsoft for 1.62 billion rubles became known of acquisition by VTB 24 bank.

In 2016 purchase over 220 thousand licenses of the American corporation for a period of 3 years carried out Rosseti. Delivery cost then exceeded 2 billion rubles, and the collective participant as a part of companies "Softline Trade" (leader) and Lanit became the winner. For 1.777 billion rubles of the solution of Microsoft bought Rosatom. As the supplier the Croc company, the delivery period - acted 3 years.

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