Alexey Ananyin, Borlas: Digital Economy will affect each of us

Alexey Ananyin: The concept of the digital economy has reached the state level, which means the state openly recognizes the existing trend and calls for attention to it. The Digital Economy itself is a very correct program. It is aimed at a large-scale transformation of the real sector of the economy and social sphere. The global state project will affect each of us, since it includes the creation of "smart cities" and the digitalization of infrastructure, the economy, health care, education, and information security. These transformations can fundamentally change our lives, our work and our communication.

But the digital economy alone cannot exist without producing industries, it is an instrument for improving the work of the existing industrial sector of the economy. In the industrial industry, this mechanism has already been launched and in its scale, volume and complexity has received a very specific definition - the fourth industrial revolution or "Industry 4.0." The concept of "Industry 4.0" envisages the end-to-end digitalization of all physical assets of the enterprise and their integration into a single ecosystem.

The production environment becomes intelligent. Prototypes of complexes are being developed when machines require minimal operator participation in their work, different production chains are automatically coordinated with each other and help decide on the most profitable way to produce the product. The information environment combines all stages of product development, production and maintenance, significantly increasing the productivity and competitiveness of digital production.

Alexey Ananyin: Borlas has been on the path to digitalization and business transformation for more than a year in accordance with trends in the IT industry. Our team has already grown from its traditional functional structure of a classical integrator. Today, we are not so much suppliers of iron and software as strategic partners in solving the business tasks of our customers, as well as developers of business applications. Accumulated experience, understanding of market development trends, balanced portfolio of products, resources and competencies allows us to assess the situation from the inside and offer technological innovative solutions in accordance with the current level of digitalization and taking into account the expected results.

We organize our business on the basis of a specific pool of advanced solutions, offering models of digital transformation of enterprises and concepts of standards in the field of industrial Internet of things, smart manufacturing, artificial intelligence, information security, working with Big Data and Big Data tools. But we always start with a deep examination, during which we develop a strategy that allows you to efficiently carry out the project both in terms of the optimal funds spent and in terms of the most complete solution of the tasks set by the customer.

Intelligent solutions for modern manufacturing, including digital product design and lifecycle management, are being implemented based on PLM software products. In 2017, Borlas once again showed an increase in PLM turnover due to the implementation of high-tech projects for the largest companies in the aerospace industry. As a result of digitalization of production, our customers implement large high-tech projects, gain productivity growth and reduce the time for new products to enter the market.

Alexey Ananyin: Artificial intelligence today, like electricity at the beginning of the last century, captures all industries and spaces. And soon there will not be a single area, wherever there is application for it. There is no point in trying to be smarter than artificial intelligence, but you are not trying to overtake the car, it is simply impossible. Today, for example, we offer the Luna Platform facial recognition system from VisionLabs, built on neural networks and capable of working with highly loaded databases containing more than 1 million samples for recognition. No person is able to remember and identify such a number of persons, and artificial intelligence can.

Now this solution is being tested in one of the airlines, where a service is organized in business halls for VIP customers, recognizing the person who approached the scoreboard and showing him his flight. Meanwhile, the applications of Luna Platform are quite a lot. In banks, it can be used for free authorization in the information system, in MCDS - for passing the final stage of double authentication, when the program checks the data of the magnetic card with the employee's image. In industrial enterprises where the process of bypassing equipment is automated, the platform will provide authorization on the bypass tablet.

More and more companies, even conservative ones such as large industrial enterprises and government agencies, are turning towards the innovations you are talking about. And this is quite natural. Digital transformations must go through a stage that removes all technological shortcomings and risks and is already being implemented in a polished form in strategically important industries. If we talk about Borlas cases, then we have completed a major project to create an information security system based on cryptographic technologies for the financial state structure. Thanks to this work, we received the status of a platinum partner of the domestic vendor "Security Code."

We see interest from customers in cloud technologies, which corresponds to global trends. It is known that the volume of the global market for managed cloud services in the next five years will grow by an average of 18% per year and by 2021 will reach more than $60 billion (according to IDC analysts, approx. Ed.). To move to a virtual infrastructure, we have a full line of services: from developing a strategy with a step-by-step roadmap, migrating applications to their administration, technical and functional support in the cloud. We offer our customers to migrate workloads to the Oracle Cloud platform and provide SaaS part of our own products on a model basis. Among them are a family of mobile applications based on the mobile application platform developed in the company.

Alexey Ananyin: Our key areas with a small share of inversion remain favorites for financial indicators. They firmly maintain leadership in the company's total revenue, as we continue to work actively to create and maintain corporate information management systems of leading Russian and Western companies. These are dozens of large projects, including the development of sectoral ERP for agriculture, the automation of GE financial processes in Russia, the creation of a solution for controlling financial flows of Leroy Merlin, the introduction of 1C ERP for GNPP Region. Borlas also continues to be an IT partner in the development of ERP systems of Uralkali, Sukhoi, Eurocement and others.

Moreover, having expanded the product line last year due to domestic business applications 1C and Galaxy, we strengthened our position in this segment and ensured steady growth in the future.

Alexey Ananyin: In many areas, we maintained stable financial indicators and this appropriately affected the revenue of the company, which reached about 5 billion rubles last year . As in previous years, a significant portion of revenue is associated with IT services, which account for 80% of the company's total turnover.

In terms of industry, 43.6% of revenue came from projects for industrial enterprises, growth here amounted to 11.8%. We also have positive dynamics in the field of telecommunications, where we are engaged in supporting and maintaining a large variety of technical software platforms for a key partner - Rostelecom.

Analyzing the financial results of the year, we see interest in digital design and product lifecycle management, projects to improve production planning and control, and equipment reliability management. As before, customers need services for refining and configuring business applications and their technical support. In all these popular areas we offer our solutions and services.