Sviridenko Andrey Vladimirovich

Sviridenko Andrey Vladimirovich

Professional biography

Andrei Sviridenko graduated from VMK Moscow State University with honors.

In 1991, the ASKER software product, developed by Andrei Sviridenko along with a classmate, was acquired by the German company GTS Group GmbH. The amount of the license amounted to the starting capital of SPIRIT.

The Russian company SPIRIT, founded by Sviridenko in 1992, began to develop and promote Russian software products and technologies abroad. Since its inception, SPIRIT has been an almost 100% exporter, supplying its world-class products to telecommunications, software and Internet companies, leaders of the global technology industry, as well as world telecom operators.

Today, SPIRIT Group is the world's leading developer and licensor of software products in the field of Voice and Video over IP and Internet video telephony. SPIRIT customers are more than 250 of the world's largest manufacturers of communications equipment and software, including more than 30 client companies from the Fortune-500 list. In December 2007, SPIRIT entered the top ten leaders in the global Internet telephony market according to the American analytical publication FierceVoIP. The company has more than 20 prestigious world awards "Product of the Year" for the quality and innovation of SPIRIT software products.

Sviridenko is an active participant in various professional communities, both Russian (Russoft, ARPP, APEAP) and international (as US-RBC, etc.), a member of inter-government working groups in the field of telecommunications, software and high technology with a dozen different countries, he is a frequent guest and speaker in famous international and Russian professional forums.

Andrey Sviridenko is also the founder of VideoMost.com companies, the developer of saas services for many-point Internet video conferences, SeeStorm developing innovative technologies in the field of synthetic 3D video, and SPIRIT Telecom, which has been engaged in Glonass GPS software and design, KV and satellite communications since 1995.

The SPIRIT group of companies, which has been operating in the international software market for 18 years, has been developing and licensing high-tech software products for conferencing, speech and video processing. Among clients of SPIRIT there are such leaders of the world telecommunication market as Apple Adobe, ARM, AT&T, Blizzard, BT, China Mobile Cisco Ericsson HP, HTC Huawei, Korea Telecom, Kyocera LG Microsoft, NEC Oracle, Polycom, Radvision Samsung Skype, Texas Instruments Toshiba, Veraz, ZTE and more than 250 other producers of the telecommunication equipment and software and also the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry Formations and Sciences of the Russian Federation and Presidential Administration.

SPIRIT's direct customers control more than 60% of the global smartphone market. Soft SPIRIT provides more than 200 million communication channels in 80 countries.

2012: Opposition to the dominance of foreign suppliers

In October 2012, Andrei Sviridenko in his report at the expert council at the FAS announced the monopolization of the Russian market by IT solutions of American suppliers. This situation, in his opinion, is supported by domestic integrators and distributors, "paying unscrupulous officials high kickbacks." To change the current order, Sviridenko proposed a number of measures. The full text of the report is reproduced below.

The global software market is captured by monopolists. Companies such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco-Webex, Apple, etc. - each occupies more than 60% of the world market in its grocery niches, which are extremely wide and constantly growing. The United States actually supports the global expansion of its technological monopolists, and does not fight it. Europe is in the US forward, and only a state-regulated China is trying to build its own and independent system of national high-tech manufacturers, which is absolutely necessary for the country's information security and technological independence in the modern information world.

As is well known, it is impossible to fight monopoly by market methods, on the contrary, the open market (including the WTO) is arranged in a way that supports and strengthens the existing monopolist. Monopolism can be prevented and limited only to competent state regulation.

Software monopolism is even scarier and stronger than monopolism in other areas, because the cost of replicating software products is 0, there is no minimum production cost. This allows the monopolist to first distribute his product for free to kill all competitors, and then, when the market is completely captured, assign any prices to his product (or conditions, which are sometimes even more important than money and more dangerous) in the absence of any real alternative. Free cheese, as you know, happens only in a mousetrap. World monopolists have been successful in putting the whole world on the needle of their free products to dictate conditions, and earning tens of billions of dollars from related or related products.

For example, a free open OS Android for mobile devices has already become the world leader in market share, and has essentially the only goal - to promote search and other Google products that bring the main income to mobile platforms, and maintain the global search monopoly of Google. Same with the popular free browser. Google Chrome

Each of Microsoft, Google, Cisco-Webex, Apple not only already has extremely wide product lines that cover almost all the real needs of users, but also actively and constantly expand their product lines, through their own developments, which spend billions of dollars, and purchases of American startups. All understandable reasonable food niches are already occupied, all basic needs of users are already covered, products of foreign monopolists. The state, as you know, is not engaged in technological experiments, but buys only known products for understandable needs.

The fate of innovative startups with American venture capital financing - narrow side niches, tests of new technologies, and their fate - either go bankrupt for the first 2 years (9 out of 10) or be bought by a world leader (1 out of 10), startups have no other real alternatives. Meaningful and systematic exits of domestic investors (exit) from innovative startups without American venture capital financing are not currently known, and even their practical possibility raises great doubts among experts.

Over the past 20 years, we have not seen other good development and growth options for non-American startups around the world. Examples of the success of the IPO Google and Facebook are completely not applicable to startups in Russia, on the contrary, these are examples of US investors and the US state supporting their own monopolists. Skype is a rare example of a European startup that was bought by an American leader for more than a couple hundred million dollars. And the purchase of a promising technology startup for $200 million is a bargaining chip for a monopolist with a market capitalization of more than $200 billion.

California has long been aggressive and very successful in vacuum cleansing the best brains from around the world. Cases of purchases of Russian software startups by American technology leaders over the past 20 years are practically not known at all. In order to receive venture capital financing from Silicon Valley, the founder of the company and CEO, a key team of the development firm, all technology (intellectual property) and financial flows must be located in California, at a maximum distance of 40 minutes by car from a venture capital investor (this is a requirement of investment funds). Only the R&D team can stay in Russia. Attracting venture capital financing, all promising startups, including those with R&D in Russia, very quickly become American in terms of ownership structure.

Over the past 15 years, the entire Russian Internet has been busy mostly copying foreign products and business models, and has given birth to very little of its unique and new. In Russia, over the past 20 years, world software monopolists have also captured all team heights. Numerous domestic system integrators and distributors earn hundreds of millions of dollars by selling foreign software to our state and companies, and paying unscrupulous officials high kickbacks. The volume of purchases of foreign software products by government bodies and companies in Russia exceeds $2 billion per year.

Since officials and decision makers in large buyers are well and pre-fed by local partners of leading foreign software vendors, when a competitive Russian vendor arises, which is always significantly smaller in size and turnover than a world monopolist, it is cut off from the competition even at the stage of compiling technical requirements, based on the allegedly insufficient functionality of the domestic product.

Thus, it does not come to price competition in the competition for the FZ-94, and a significantly more expensive foreign product with a brand is purchased, because the kickbacks on it are significantly higher, and there are no complaints about the name of the world leader and the wide functionality of the product. So the domestic manufacturer is killed, by removing it from the financial flows of public procurement, by preventing competitions. At the same time, the excess product functionality of the world monopolist at a significantly higher price is often not really needed by the customer (as you know, 80% of the needs are covered by 20% of the functionality), but is used only to cut off potential competitors with a lower price, to get higher kickbacks by interested corrupt buyers.

Domestic software grocery companies, with a turnover of as a rule less than $100 million (domestic developers with a large turnover can be counted on the fingers of one hand), simply cannot compete in terms of the breadth of food functionality with world monopolists with a turnover of more than $30 million each. Not even receiving the opportunity to participate in tenders, domestic software manufacturers do not receive money, and do not have a chance to catch up with world monopolists in terms of functionality, even in the market of their own country.

20 years ago, many domestic software companies became exporters, not from a good life, but only because there was no other demand (domestically) for our products and services. But 5 years ago, the price advantage of Russian programmers was lost. Today, developers' ZPs continue to grow rapidly, have long overtaken the ZPs of Hindus and Chinese, and today are at the payment level of European programmers. The number of qualified developers is declining due to the worsening demographic situation in the country and the decline in the prestige of technical professions. Young people see for themselves the warm places of employees of large and state-owned companies, and not domestic technological innovators.

Today, new domestic development firms simply do not have a chance to quickly and successfully export their products and services, for this they have neither money nor experience in international sales and marketing. Almost all investment funds that offer domestic start-ups smart-money and experience are money from foreign investors who simply buy up Russian talents at the root, i.e. at the lowest price.

By the time the domestic developer spent $10 million and 3 years creating a new product, the world monopolist had already spent more than $100 million on a similar competitor product, or bought for a couple of hundred million dollars an American startup that made such advanced technology.

As a result, there are only a few domestic software product companies that have achieved meaningful success in exporting to foreign markets, because these companies have always worked in niches where Microsoft did not work, and all were created 20 years ago using the price and technological advantage of domestic programmers, which today has disappeared. New strong technology software companies in Russia in the past 10 years have practically not arisen. Only a few domestic grocery companies that achieved meaningful success in the share of the domestic market arose more than 12 years ago, when Google was not a monopolist, or rather Google then did not exist at all as a company.

Without the intervention of the regulator, the state, world monopoly (in Russia, in the public sector), it is impossible to win by purely market methods, and Russian software companies, despite a good education system, development institutions, tax benefits, grants from funds, etc., will be doomed to be on the far periphery of technological markets and products, even in the public sector, even in their own country.

Development institutions, venture capital investors, a system of grants and funds are necessary, but not sufficient, because these important tools do not create demand for an innovative software product at home.

Only the state can create demand for competitive domestic software products. And the cities within the country, as you know, are the most important driver of the growth of the Russian economy.

Proposals to combat monopolism in the public sector in the Russian Federation

1. Develop an accurate mechanism for real (and not on paper) participation in public procurement of competitive domestic software companies. For example, to require that at least 1 domestic manufacturer participate in any state competition for the purchase of software, provided that there are competitive domestic manufacturers in this grocery niche (software expertise centers in Russia are far from all grocery niches, and doing a domestic analogue of Windows or Word simply does not make sense). Ministry or other state body m.b. holder of the register of competitive domestic producers and their food niches, by analogy with the accreditation of software producers to receive tax benefits.

2. Develop an accurate mechanism for forcing mandatory exports for domestic software companies with a turnover of more than $ XXX million and market share in their grocery niche in Russia of more than XX% and the share of state clients in the turnover of the company of more than XX%, which previously received support in public procurement.

3. Domestic software associations to actively support with their concrete actions the decision of Vladimir Putin from 17.02.2012 (protocol VP-P10-4pr, para. 4) oblige all state authorities to keep public statistics on the share of purchases of domestic and foreign software, and help responsible ministries (The Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Finance) actively work on its rapid and practical implementation already in 2012^[1]

2015

As of December 2015 - Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Board of Spirit DSP

2019: General Director of Video Bridge LLC

Since April 11, 2019 - General Director and founder of Video Bridge LLC.

2021: Member of Russoft Management Board

As of September 2021, he is a member of the board of the Russoft software development association in Russia.

Notes