Already in 2023, it was obvious that the Russian information technology market continues to actively develop, the negative impact of external factors did not have a dramatic impact, and the IT services and IT outsourcing market continues to move towards technological sovereignty. The Russian government has taken measures to support the IT segment, both in the field of regulatory and financial support. In addition, Russian companies invest their own funds in the development of IT infrastructure, ranging from server equipment and PACs to IT platforms for business process management.

The focus is still on the development of AI tools, machine learning, Big Data, the formation of technological stacks that meet the requirements of import independence, and countering threats to information security. Market participants are looking for options to overcome the shortage of qualified personnel, the high cost of borrowed resources.

The direction related to the use of enterprise data as a business resource has been identified and continues to develop. This is primarily due to the expansion of the penetration of artificial intelligence technologies into all segments of the economy, in addition, there were systems for the adaptive transfer of data from outdated storage to new ones, as well as systems for transparent migration between Data Lake and DWH.

Over the past two years, the situation in the IT services market has largely stabilized. At the same time, the quantitative indicators of the market volume and its dynamics differ significantly among different experts. According to TAdviser analysts, in 2023 the market volume reached 652 billion rubles. (+ 12%), and in 2024, according to preliminary data, it increased by 10% to 717 billion rubles.

Leonid Brodsky, director of 1C-Corporate Management Systems, believes that in 2023 the market for services amounted to 700 billion rubles, and in 2024 it will grow to the level of 850-900 billion rubles (i.e. growth will range from ~ 21% to ~ 28.5% compared to 2023 - ed.).

Konstantin Levushkin, head of the frontend department of the IT company SimbirSoft, recalled that, according to analytical data from STREAM Consulting, in 2023 the total cost of Russian companies for IT services amounted to ₽681,4 billion. For 2024 and 2025, he predicts the preservation of the same high rates - about 30% per year.

By 2028, the volume of the IT services market may reach almost ₽2 trillion. Given the high demand for IT specialists in custom development and the lack of personnel, we can safely declare that the forecasts are quite reasonable, "said Konstantin Levushkin.

Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of BARS Group, and Alisa Peskova, Junior Marketing Specialist of Texnoprom, also agree with the market volume estimate of 681.4 billion rubles in 2023. Alisa Peskova believes that the volume of the IT services market in Russia in 2024 will grow to about 1.935 trillion rubles, which is associated with an increase in demand for digitalization, automation of business processes and the introduction of new technologies such as AI and cloud solutions.

This rapid rise indicates significant changes and adaptations both within the industry and in approaches to the use of information technology in corporations, "said Elvira Gilmanova. - By the end of 2024, this sector is expected to grow by about 30%. "

Alexey Vikharev, director of services at Kraion, believes that in 2023 the capacity of the Russian IT services market grew, despite external economic challenges and changes in legislation, and amounted to about 700 billion rubles. In 2024, according to the expert, this figure may grow to 900 billion rubles (an increase of 25-30%).

Andrey Malafeev, a representative of the Ramax group of companies, agrees with the assessment of growth by 30%:

According to our estimate, the market growth will be at least 30% year-on-year by the end of 2024. "

Over the past four years, each segment has been growing over 10%, so in 2024 you can count on the total volume of the Russian market of about 750 billion rubles. This point of view is shared by Denis Kozlov, Commercial Director of FERRUM IT Group.

Anna Ruder, Commercial Director of Sberbank-Service, believes that by the end of 2023, the volume of the IT services market can be estimated at 3 trillion rubles, and in 2024 it could amount to about 3.5 trillion.

Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director of Sales and Marketing at I-Teco, estimated the 2023 IT services market at 600-620 billion rubles, and believes that by the end of 2024 the market will reach the level of 620-650 billion.

Mikhail Rozhkov, head of the PARMA TG business development department, believes that expert estimates of market growth by 15-20% over the past two years (and even 30%) are too optimistic, and the real dynamics are lower:

The IT services market is more likely to be called stagnating than actively growing. If the key rate remains high, the situation with freezing development projects is likely to continue next year. "

In 2023, the IT services market grew due to the large volume of import substitution. Customer budgets flowed from foreign vendors to Russian ones, new IT services were created to replace the departed, which stimulated the growth of the IT outsourcing market. The same trend continued in 2024, but the growth rate gradually decreased. This was announced by Sergey Kozhemyakin, executive director of AGIMA. The expert believes that the main volume of migrations and import substitution has already been passed in 2023-2024, and in the near future the high rate of the Central Bank will not allow increasing investments in IT infrastructure development projects, so market growth is still in question.

For the second year in a row, MTS became the leader in the rating of the largest IT service providers in Russia, prepared by TAdviser in 2024 based on revenue for 2023. Its income from this type of activity increased by 37.4% to 120.8 billion rubles.

The top 5 largest IT service providers in Russia also include the Digital Economy League, I-Teco, Jet Infosystems and IBS Group.

Quantitatively, the composition of the participants in this TAdviser rating is growing every year. In 2023, the total revenue from the provision of IT services by more than 150 companies for the first time exceeded half a trillion rubles.

The fact that in the service segment is a brake on development, in outsourcing it acts as a booster, forming an additional volume of orders for support and support. The experts interviewed by us noticed this trend in the Open Source market, where the departure of large vendor-license providers, which make it possible to legally use new builds of popular software, creates opportunities for domestic companies not only in finalizing open source solutions, but also in maintaining and supporting already installed software. In this regard, some experts assess the growth of the market to the level of over 300 billion rubles.

{{quote 'author=Sergey Galeev, head of backend department at IT company SimbirSoft | The total volume of the business process outsourcing market last year reached 386 billion rubles. According to the Russian Association of Private Employment Agencies, in 2023 the share of IT outsourcing in this volume was 4%. Thus, in monetary terms, the IT outsourcing market amounted to approximately 15.4 billion rubles.}}

Andrei Matvienko believes that in 2023 the IT outsourcing market amounted to 100-110 billion rubles in monetary terms, and in 2024 - 110-120 billion.

Alexey Vikharev noted that, according to him, in 2023 the IT outsourcing market in Russia was estimated at 250-280 billion rubles. Companies began to outsource infrastructure services, system integration and processes related to information security. This approach is due to both economic efficiency and a lack of qualified IT personnel. Among the most popular areas are cloud infrastructure management, technical support for users and maintenance of video conferencing systems. In this regard, by the end of 2024, further growth of the market volume in quantitative and value terms is expected. By the end of 2024, the volume of the IT outsourcing market in Russia may grow to 300-320 billion rubles. According to the expert, such key areas provide growth: further use and expansion of the operation of cloud services, the introduction of domestic software, cybersecurity and maintenance of distributed corporate structures. An additional incentive for the development of outsourcing will be an increase in the number of companies switching to the model of using IT subscription services.

'The IT outsourcing market in Russia in 2023 is estimated in the range of 300-350 billion rubles. It is predicted that in 2024 the market volume may reach 600-700 billion rubles. This is due to the growing tendency of companies to outsource IT services to optimize costs and improve efficiency. " Alisa Peskova, junior marketing specialist at Texnoprom

According to Elvira Gilmanova, in 2023 the Russian IT outsourcing market showed steady growth, with an increase in the share of outsourcing services in the total volume of IT services to 40-50%. Russian companies are increasingly turning to IT outsourcing services to improve their efficiency, optimize processes and focus on key areas of activity. In general, the IT outsourcing market is moving forward at an annual rate of 10-20%, which, according to the expert, indicates the growing confidence of the business in external IT service providers and adaptation to modern technological challenges.

Testing, maintenance and technical support services, regardless of the ON source of origin (vendor, customization,, Open Source customer's own development), equipment maintenance, traditionally included in the IT outsourcing circle, according to most experts, will grow in the near future. Growth estimates are about 10% year-on-year.

author = Anna Ruder, Commercial Director of Sberbank-Service The capacity of the IT outsourcing market, traditionally, is approximately 15% of the IT services market. However, it is very likely that in 2025 we will see changes and redistributions in the volume of budgets dictated by new trends, which will lead to an increase in the share of this area in the IT services market. "

The leader in the new rating of IT outsourcers, prepared in 2024 following the results of reporting for 2023, was the Digital Economy League, which in the period under consideration managed to bypass Jet Infosystems. The League's revenue in this area increased by 3% and amounted to almost 18 billion rubles. The third place was taken by the IT-One holding.

In total, over 70 companies took part in the ranking. Their total revenue amounted to 119.5 billion rubles.

As of the end of March 2025, the TAdviser database contains information on 2.7 thousand projects in the field of IT outsourcing. Most of them fall on three industries: the public sector, financial services and trade.

The IT services market is driven by the development of industrial production, the digitalization of the economy. Of high importance to the industry is government support for key digital transformation programs. The departure of foreign producers for not all manufacturers has become an incentive for the transition to domestic solutions, which determines the preservation of demand for non-promotional support. IT consulting, system integration, and critical infrastructure support services are actively developing.

On other non-technological trends and drivers of both past years and the most relevant ones - let's dwell in more detail in this section.

Most of the experts surveyed pointed to a shortage of personnel as an important factor that had a serious impact on the market in 2024. The business spends large funds on current salaries, lays large budgets for its increase, retention of employees. Against this background, the demand for outsourcing and outstaffing is growing.

Sergey Galeev, head of the backend department of the IT company SimbirSoft, mentioned the growth in demand for DWH specialists. The shortage of competent developers was noted by Konstantin Levushkin, head of the frontend department of the IT company SimbirSoft.

There is a growing shortage of high-quality professionals even at the middle level, not to mention the seniors. At the same time, beginners of juniors are in abundance, "said Mikhail Rozhkov, head of the business development department of PARMA TG.

The lack of specialized specialists has negative consequences - there is less and less valuable expertise on the market, "said Alexander Kazakov, director of the integrated outsourcing department of Jet Infosystems.

According to the expert, in the near future it will not be possible to solve the problem of a shortage of specialized specialists. In this light, an alternative is a service partnership with large IT integrators who have staffed teams and developed expertise over decades of working with foreign vendors.

Andrey Malafeev, a representative of the Ramax group of companies, also pointed out the fact that the growth of labor migration associated with changes in the labor market, as well as the shortage of qualified IT specialists, played a role in increasing demand for IT outsourcing and outstaffing. In particular, companies began to resort to external contractors more often to ensure the necessary expertise.

Companies have increasingly turned to outsourcing as a way to compensate for the lack of their own IT specialists, "confirmed Alexey Vikharev, director of services at Krayon.

The demand for specialists combining competencies in IT with an understanding of the technological processes of a particular industrial enterprise - engineering personnel, programmers for CNC machines - has escalated. This was told by Denis Kozlov, Commercial Director of FERRUM IT Group.

As an integrator, we periodically encounter a situation when you come to the enterprise, offer a ready-made solution for the customer's task, and there is no one to do this on the other side, since there are no mid-range and high-level equipment operators, "the expert noted.

Julius Goldberg, head of department at GlowByte, said that there is a leading increase in rates for rare and unique IT positions, for example, such as "leading data architect," "senior DevOps," etc. At the same time, the difference between the rates of ordinary specialists and highly qualified experts is increasing. Competition in typical positions, such as the "system analyst" or the "ETL developer" of the middle level, is quite high, so rates on them grow no more than inflation, or even less.

In connection with the trend of competition between enterprises for employees, Sergei Kozhemyakin, executive director of AGIMA, shared this observation: preferential IT mortgages began to wind down in the summer of 2024, which greatly affected the ability of metropolitan employers to attract new personnel from the regions. At the same time, in all other cities of Russia, except for cities of federal significance, it remains possible to take out an IT mortgage for employees, which weakens the IT companies of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the competition for personnel with regional ones.

But iOS specialists were not at all in price. Nikolai Nikolenko, STO KODE, spoke about reducing the number of requests for searching for iOS specialists, as well as reducing their rates. According to the expert, the lack of official alternatives to the App Store forces companies to look for workarounds or completely refuse to create applications for this platform.

Hand in hand with the shortage of personnel is the trend of the demographic pit. According to Nikita Sannikov, commercial director of 65apps, we are and will be in it for the coming decades. In the meantime, Generation Z is becoming more and more significant in the labor market, said Andrei Samokhin, director of the STEP LOGIC service department.

Their preferences for work, career development and work-life balance are beginning to define new standards in approaches to building an IT outsourcing team, "the expert shared.

One of the indirect consequences of the situation on the labor market, Vasily Kuts, director of industry solutions at commercial banks K2Tex, considers the growing demand for Low/No Code development.

A significant increase in the key rate and the cost of loans was noted by Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director of Sales and Marketing at I-Teco, as the main new trend that influenced the market in 2024.

One of the main factors that influenced the IT services and IT outsourcing market was the increase in the key rate of the Central Bank Vasily Kuts, director of industry solutions in commercial banks K2Tech.

{{quote| High rate of the Central Bank does not allow to take loans for business development on terms that business can afford, "- confirmed Leonid Brodsky, Director of 1C-Corporate Management Systems.}}

Sergey Kozhemyakin, executive director of AGIMA, called the Central Bank rate "huge" and "unprecedented," forcing customers to seriously tighten conditions by pushing through large-sized postpayment payments.

Previously, half of the customer portfolio was either full or 50% prepaid. Customers now pay for services 60 business days after the quarter expires. That is, they pay for April in September. During this time, money is getting cheaper by 10%, "said Sergey Kozhemyakin.

According to the expert, this is a very difficult challenge for IT outsourcing, because employees' salaries must be paid monthly, and money from customers comes with a six-month delay. Outsourcers have to learn to put this factor in rates and calculations of profitability.

For example, you can offer a customer discounts if he partially pays for work, and, conversely, make surcharges if his postpayment conditions are severe, "he said.

The weakening of the Russian currency, rising rates and lower availability of loans have reduced the volume of investment projects. This observation was shared by Andrei Zubkov, head of the project office MONS (). KORUS Consulting Group of Companies According to him, companies have begun to carefully calculate the risks, which slows down the launch of new initiatives, and investors prefer to minimize errors, which restrains the active introduction of new technologies and solutions.

In 2024, one of the factors that influenced the market was unstable lending to small and medium-sized businesses, said Denis Kozlov, commercial director of FERRUM IT Group:

At first glance, this is not an industry-wide problem, because traditionally the lion's share of IT services is closed by the largest suppliers. Nevertheless, the current situation in the Russian IT market is characterized by high dynamics and the emergence of new software manufacturers, which, according to our estimates, will enter the market and continue to grow next year. Therefore, regulatory issues in this area are very sensitive. For an integrator, efficient medium-sized businesses are no less important than industry giants, because this expands the pool of possible suppliers. Companies with a flexible business model, which may not produce the most functional product, but clearly fall into the customer's needs, are in great demand today. "

Meanwhile, the trend to reduce IT budgets and investments is gaining momentum, logistics costs are growing. This was told by Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director for Sales and Marketing of I-Teco.

Companies began to pay more attention to the transparency of the cost of services and choose flexible payment models, such as pay-as-you-go, "said Alexey Vikharev, director of services at Krayon.

According to Alisa Peskova, associate marketing officer at Texnoprom, changes in the economic situation, such as inflation and currency fluctuations, forced companies to revise their budgets and look for better ways to manage costs, which increased the demand for outsourcing.

In response to global geopolitical changes, companies are being forced to overhaul their supply chains, including IT services. In 2024, they will look for new sources for procurement and develop local solutions to minimize the risks associated with international politics and trade barriers. In addition, amid uncertainty and a rapidly changing market, companies will begin to demand more flexibility from IT suppliers in terms of contractual terms, delivery times and cost. This was announced by Andrey Malafeev, a representative of the Ramax group of companies.

The remote format began to develop in a pandemic and strengthened even more in 2022. Then the specialists dispersed to different countries, which is why the business was forced to quickly rebuild to cooperate in distributed teams.

Some companies, due to political restrictions or security requirements, still returned all employees to the office. For them, the cost of personnel has increased, but they have gained obvious advantages from collaboration. In turn, those companies that continue to work remotely can attract cheaper personnel distributed across Russia and the world.

The ability to work remotely is an advantage, a condition that employees, applicants distinguish more often than others, said Sergey Kozhemyakin, executive director of AGIMA.

The transition to remote work has become the norm for many companies, which has increased the need for cloud solutions and IT support, as well as outsourcing for managing IT infrastructure, "said Alisa Peskova, associate marketing specialist at Texnoprom.

Continuing post-covid reality continues to stimulate demand for services for remote work and distributed management, "confirmed Alexey Vikharev, Director of Services at Krayon.

The practice of working with short iterations, which became a trend in 2021-2022, remains to this day, said Nikita Sannikov, commercial director of 65apps. According to the expert, the "long" contracts for the implementation of large turnkey systems categorically no longer become. They are still being broken down so that risks and changes can be managed more flexibly.

More and more companies are introducing the DevOps approach to accelerate the development and release of new digital products, said Alexey Vikharev, director of services at Krayon.

{{quote| This year there were a large number of requests for a quick start of projects, when the first MVP with sufficiently loaded functionality should have appeared within the first month, "said Nikolai Nikolenko, STO KODE.}}

According to the expert, most often the company receives such requests from customers, within which teams that work together, including all roles, are involved in the implementation of the project or part of the project together with the customer's team. In addition, there are requirements for the future scaling of projects and a stack of technologies, which means that many nuances must be foreseen at the start.

The level of complexity in the provision of IT outsourcing services is constantly growing, which is due to the lack of support from departed vendors, high customer requirements for the quality of services. These factors negatively affect employees, and employers are obliged to proactively respond to external and internal stimuli in order to prevent team burnout. Therefore, the management method shifts towards attention to the well-being of employees and the creation of an inclusive working environment, a focus on corporate culture and interaction between participants in the process of providing IT outsourcing services. This was told by Andrei Samokhin, Director of the Service Department of STEP LOGIC.

Increased attention to the issue of mental health of employees leads to a revision of corporate cultures and the introduction of more flexible working conditions, "confirmed Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of BARS Group.

Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director for Sales and Marketing of I-Teco, noted the shift in the emphasis of state financing to large infrastructure construction sites (not IT).

As Vasily Kutz, director of industry solutions at commercial banks K2Tekh, said, the priority in IT investments is shifting towards critical infrastructure - both equipment and software.

As Nikita Sannikov, commercial director of 65apps, said, the basic request for custom development is evolving. The quality of the formulated tasks has increased several times. For large customers, requests increasingly contain formalized business expectations. This development of the market leads to an increase in requirements for suppliers. It becomes almost impossible to get a contract only through competent sales. Requirements for the quality of work composition, cost and value are growing.

Given the increase in the number and quality of boxed solutions, with an increase in the level of requirements for suppliers, competition in the custom development market is also growing proportionally. There are more and more companies with competitive competencies and experience, resources, ready for dumping to get a new contract.

The growth of demands also stems from the growing uncontested importance: IT is becoming deeper in management and key business structures, dependence on IT is growing. This is compensated by the fact that customer requests are becoming more predictable, "typical": if earlier many tasks were solved only by custom development, now ready-made solutions or "semi-finished products" are often suitable - solutions that require small improvements for integration into the existing IT system.

As Julius Goldberg, head of department at GlowByte, said, a number of large companies have taken up the development of their own data management platforms. Not just for yourself, but in order to sell your product on the market. Such competition for traditional vendors is not very pleasant, since large financial and industrial holdings have great investment opportunities.

In addition, customers began to demand exclusive rights to the implemented system. Not only the right to modify, but also so that it can be sold. Accordingly, the contractor will not be able to use all the developments that were made not only on this project, but also on previous ones on other projects (legally). Therefore, although in most cases it does not reach trade in developed software, this approach does not contribute to the normal development of the market, the expert believes.

As Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of BARS Group, said, outsourcing with methodological support is becoming more and more in demand in various areas of business, including subject areas and legal aspects. It involves the transfer of certain business processes to third parties while simultaneously developing and implementing standards and practices for tasks. The benefits of outsourcing include resource savings, access to highly skilled professionals, flexibility, and risk mitigation. In legal matters, methodological support is important for the correct execution of contracts, compliance with legislation and protection of the company's interests.

According to Sergei Kozhemyakin, executive director of AGIMA, the volume of government orders on the market has always been large, but earlier agencies and studios could work exclusively with commercial organizations and international companies. Today, in the Russian IT outsourcing market, it is impossible to be successful without contacting the state, and working with it has its own bright specifics. In other words, the increase in the volume of money from state and near-state structures on the market affects the format of procurement and acceptance of work.

It is natural that the defense industry sector today is one of the actively developing. This is the opinion of Denis Kozlov, Commercial Director of FERRUM IT Group.

Over the past few years, we have seen the gradual penetration of end-to-end technologies that allow a number of business processes to be digitized within one platform. We also observe that the defense industry enterprises, having a significant concentration of resources, develop their own software and hardware solutions focused on the needs of internal customers, "the expert said.

The containment of Chinese manufacturers, a kind of state support for the IT sector, was named by the mechanism of the register of Russian manufacturers Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director for Sales and Marketing of I-Teco. The expert noted a decrease in the activity of Chinese vendors and attempts to enter the Russian market of manufacturers from friendly countries (in addition to China). He also spoke about the decrease in the influence of the gray import factor and the growing impact of sanctions on working with Chinese partners.

As Mikhail Rozhkov, head of the PARMA TG business development department, noted, the IT market is consolidating: large companies continue to increase their scale and expand their areas of activity through M&A transactions, which leads to the "squeezing out" of medium and small companies from IT projects.

There is an active development of domestic technological platforms. In addition to infrastructure, companies are strengthening requests for localized technologies and services that take into account the specifics of Russian legislation. The business actively uses RPA, predictive analytics. The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to develop, the growth of the number of IoT devices leads to the need for competent management of them and high-quality analysis of the received data.

We will focus on the development of old technological trends and the emergence of new trends in this section.

Import substitution remains the main driver of the IT services market. There are more projects in which there is a complete redesign of the IT architecture and full-scale implementation of Russian solutions, and not pilot testing of individual domestic products.

As Mikhail Rozhkov, head of the PARMA TG business development department, said, approaches to designing an updated IT architecture have changed. From the very first stage of creating an architectural solution, great attention has been paid to information security risks and mechanisms for preventing them. The possibilities of further inclusion of modern technologies, including artificial intelligence technologies, in the circuit of information systems are also taken into account.

Against the background of import substitution, new Russian solutions appear that require adaptation, implementation and support, which stimulates the demand for relevant services, said Alexey Vikharev, director of services at Krayon.

Migration to domestic migration is accompanied by large investments from business, first of all, which favorably affects the development of solutions and the market as a whole, "said Alexander Kazakov, Director of the Integrated Outsourcing Department of Jet Infosystems.

There is a noticeable increase in interest in import-substituted software products, especially in the field of databases, said Andrei Zubkov, head of the project office MONS (). KORUS Consulting Group of Companies State corporations are moving to domestic software in accordance with the established deadlines under the law, and private business is moving in this direction more cautiously due to the costs and risks associated with data migration. These processes, in turn, have increased demand for IT auditing and consulting to assess infrastructure readiness for change.

In 2023, in the banking industry, we observed active testing of import substitution solutions, and in 2024 we record their large-scale implementation, "said Vasily Kutz the director of industry solutions in commercial banks K2Teh.

According to the expert, against this background, the audit and consulting market is showing growth - services for adapting to the new technological landscape are in demand, both for foreign banks that need localization and for banks whose infrastructure was built on import solutions.

Domestic vendors seek to comprehensively cover the needs of the market, replace not only software, but also offer PAC. So, for example, one of the key trends - working with AI and large language models, requires a certain infrastructure. There is a growing demand for affordable PACs - especially among smaller banks seeking to minimize the costs of implementing AI.

Now among the top 100 banks there are requests for virtualization, containerization, decision-making systems and BPM platforms, import substitution of critical systems (CRM, RTDM, SRM, etc.), building DWH on domestic DBMS, said Vasily Kuts.

The growing popularity of complex hardware and software systems, with which segment import substitution can be carried out, exceeded our expectations, "said Denis Kozlov, Commercial Director of FERRUM IT Group.

According to the expert, most of these solutions are created for information security purposes, but virtualization tools also have great prospects. In the future, virtualization is likely to replace containerization, but so far it is virtualization tools that remain the most in demand in the business. This is due to the growth in the number of software platforms, and, in part, the demand for GPU servers.

The task of BI import substitution was faced by all companies that actively used BI from the world's leading vendors, said Julius Goldberg, head of department at GlowByte. According to the expert, in this area the trend towards the migration of dashboards by the forces of the users themselves has been clearly identified due to the Self-Service BI functionality, which is possessed by the most advanced tools. Thanks to this approach, it is possible to get away from many years of projects and transfer a large amount of reporting over several months by analysts, business users, even managers. It is not necessary to teach them SQL and other skills of data engineers.

Julius Goldberg also spoke about the Greenplum case. The most popular Arenadata product was based on this freely distributed DBMS MPP. Cloud providers, including Yandex, Rostelecom, made their assemblies on it and offered them as managed services. But May 2024 was marked by the cessation of the free distribution of this DBMS. And by that time, after the departure of almost all vendors of analytical DBMS in 2022 (Oracle, Teradata, Exasol, Vertica, etc.), there were no other options. Greenplum's original licenses are now sold by a vendor from an unfriendly country. All new versions and updates after May are also unavailable. Fortunately, alternative options have appeared, for example, Data Ocean Nova.

A case similar in drama was described by Nikolai Nikolenko, STO KODE. In the context of mobile development tools (IDE), the expert said that Android Studio continues to be the main tool for Android development, and Xcode for iOS. These environments provide developers with stable functionality and remain reliable solutions. However, the situation with the server part of the software looks different. The departure of JetBrains, a developer of popular tools such as IntelliJ IDEA, has led many to switch to alternative solutions.

Nikolai Nikolenko also noted one of the nuances of import substitution, namely: when it is no longer connected with intention, but with the obligation to legally abandon foreign software, it suddenly turns out that there are no specialized systems on the Russian market, and adaptation of business processes and deployment of solutions based on "1C" is used as the fastest option. Therefore, 2024 is largely characterized by the highest demand for 1C specialists.

The technological trend of information security is the second most statistically mentioned in the feedback collected for this review from market participants. The growing level of threats requires comprehensive infrastructure and data protection solutions, which drives the demand for outsourcing these features.

The need for services and solutions for information security has significantly increased against the background of increasing DDos and cyber attacks on the resources of Russian companies and government agencies and, as a result, refusal to search for technical problems and reorientation to critical processes, "said Anna Ruder, Commercial Director of Sberbank-Service.

New laws and regulations regarding data protection and cybersecurity required companies to invest in IT services to comply, which contributed to market growth, said Alisa Peskova, associate marketing specialist at Texnoprom.

Today, solutions such as network screens, authentication systems based on biometrics and AI-based protection are more relevant than ever. Despite the fact that customers are serious about data security and privacy in IT outsourcing, more and more companies are starting to outsource security, said SimbirSoft Konstantin Levushkin, head of the frontend department of the IT company. According to the specialist, the outsourcing market, which offers comprehensive services for listening and providing services in this area, has also seriously grown.

Alexey Vikharev, director of services at Krayon, agrees with this observation. According to the expert, the growth of requirements in the field of data protection and the implementation of the law on the localization of information has increased the demand for IT outsourcing services in terms of infrastructure and data management.

An important vector of movement in the information security industry is the transition to a service model, when the information security infrastructure and solutions can be quickly expanded or scaled by a third-party provider depending on the nature and level of threats. And as the level of cyber attacks increases, the information security outsourcing market is actively growing, and the transition to a service model with SLAs installed becomes an industry standard, "said Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director of Sales and Marketing at I-Teco.

The introduction of solutions based on artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous and will very soon become the new norm. Many proven cases have appeared on the market, how AI accelerated and reduced the cost of a variety of operational processes: with their help they write texts for product cards on the site, conduct "photo shoots" for catalogs, automate the process of mass onboarding of personnel, create verification systems for compliance with the rules, provide client support. And these are only private examples. In the near future, AI will replace millions of full-time employees whose work has been typified and regulated, said Nikita Sannikov, commercial director of 65apps. According to the expert, so far such projects are being created only in large companies that can invest in them, have resources for testing and debugging, for which the effect of implementation will be significant, but next year the trend will also affect medium-sized businesses.

Many of them do not have their own IT production inhouse, so they will contact us for help - custom development. And companies that do not know how to work with AI will remain out of work, "said Nikita Sannikov.

In the meantime, AI is both as a technology and as a toolkit continues to develop and over time will be able to close more complex tasks.

The banking sector continues to allocate resources to pilot projects with AI in various directions. Thus, spectrum technologies are used to form the most relevant offers for customers, extend LTV, increase loyalty, personalization, etc.

As Vasily Kutz, director of industry solutions at commercial banks K2Tekh, said, today digital counterparts of clients are relevant, AI solutions are popular in the fields of development and support of knowledge bases, the evolution of speech analytics, chat bots and contact centers, as well as settings algorithms and context.

First of all, Russian business is trying to optimize those processes that are associated with the same type and mechanical work. For example, we in our service department are trying to reduce the burden on employees of the duty service by implementing an algorithm based on the neural network, which processes requests to technical support and automatically prepares responses to requests, "said Alexander Kazakov, director of the integrated outsourcing department of Jet Infosystems.

Business is actively applying machine learning. There is a request for ML and LLM in the banking sector. Today there are a number of areas where the situation is changing so quickly that you need to retrain models almost every day, said Julius Goldberg, head of department at GlowByte:

Obviously, it is not effective to do this manually by an analyst. RL methods and technologies come to the rescue, thanks to which ML models can themselves actually adapt to changing data. Demand for such projects has increased significantly in recent years. "

Demand for XaaS solutions remains high, and interest in hybrid and multi-cloud strategies is growing. Companies are moving to multi-cloud infrastructure to improve the reliability and flexibility of their systems. The growth of cloud provider services is taking place against the backdrop of an increasingly active transition of companies to the use of data centers.

Many companies are moving to multi-cloud solutions to avoid single-vendor dependency and improve IT flexibility. This also applies to cloud data storage, cloud computing and real-time data integration solutions, "said Andrey Malafeev, a representative of the Ramax group of companies.

Migrating critical business services to the cloud has become popular because it provides greater flexibility in business processes and accelerates the deployment of new IT solutions. In addition, this avoids the purchase of sanctions equipment, the prices of which have increased significantly due to geopolitical instability and logistics difficulties, said Andrei Zubkov, head of the MONS project office (KORUS Consulting Group of Companies ).

The departure of foreign vendors forces many companies to reconsider approaches to the use of IT infrastructure, as a result, attention to cloud solutions as an alternative to new investments in physical equipment has increased. The main motive here is to reduce implementation time and increase resource flexibility.

An important trend in 2024 I would call the growth in demand for data center services, which is due to the rise in the cost of projects for the construction of our own infrastructure, "confirmed Andrey Matvienko, Deputy Sales and Marketing Director of I-Teco.

Further growth in demand for cloud infrastructure support services and transition to Russian management systems is expected, which will strengthen the share of outsourcing and consulting services, "predicts Alexey Vikharev, Director of Services at Krayon.

There is no consensus in the market - Open Source is good or bad. Julius Goldberg, head of department at GlowByte, believes that the complexity and high cost of Open Source also affects the growing popularity of cloud services. According to the expert, small and medium-sized companies are increasingly realizing that Open Source is difficult and expensive, not free. The initial euphoria of the use of open technologies has subsided. Most small companies that cannot afford to have a large staff of highly qualified specialists (DevOps engineers, architects, developers) realized that using Open Source for them turns out to be much more difficult and even more expensive than proprietary solutions. Therefore, such companies make a choice in favor of vendors or cloud service providers that offer a higher degree of solution readiness and minimize the labor costs of companies to operate IT.

Open Source has become an alternative to Russian solutions. But the pioneers quickly dispelled the misconception about the cheapness of using such products. The operation of Open Source also requires specific expertise and large investments, especially in service. We record a certain amount of demand from business, but it turned out to be not so high, "confirmed Alexander Kazakov, director of the integrated outsourcing department of Jet Infosystems.

However, Julius Goldberg noted that Kubernetes (also Open Source) today should be considered as a standard when choosing a data management platform. Most have already left physical servers. BI, JPS and other analytical solutions worked mainly on virtual machines. And now there are more and more requirements for Kubernetes Ready. A number of large companies simply put it forward as a critical stop factor in making choice decisions.

If the vendor or contractor does not have an understanding of how to supply this or that product to Kuber, then they will have little chance of getting the project. Large companies have many products, many of them consist of a significant number of components (integration, DBMS, authorization, monitoring, etc.). The desire to make the processes of deployment and subsequent operation less costly and simpler forces you to move towards K8s. And the savings on the rational use of hardware are important today, since you can't buy cheap resources anymore, "said Julius Goldberg.

Data warehouse technologies are far from a new topic on the Russian market. Almost all large banks, retailers, telecom operators have already introduced them at home. The most significant industrial holdings in the country have also been using them for several years.

The problem with the automation and digitalization of industries is gradually becoming a thing of the past, and the problem of data quality is aggravated. It is most relevant in large organizations with an extensive organizational structure, where there are a large number of different data sources, but there is often no methodological link (how to enter data, how to structure it) between them. As a result, there is duplication, there is no uniformity of data, etc. - such an array of information simply cannot be used to provide high-quality analytics.

According to Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of BARS Group, a technological trend for the provision of services for the integrated organization of data at the enterprise is visible. We are talking about the development of methodologies, data normalization, the organization of a corporate data warehouse for the further formation of analytical reports and dashboards on their basis to help in making balanced management decisions. A well-organized data warehouse allows enterprises to form full-fledged datacets that are already suitable for machine learning.

The request for Data Quality in the banking sector was confirmed by Vasily Kutz, director of industry solutions at commercial banks K2Tekh.

As Julius Goldberg, head of department at GlowByte, said, great hopes for Hadoop as a universal big data technology have not materialized. The limitations of performance, scalability, security of this technology have led to the fact that there are already many curtailed or stagnating projects in large companies. And besides, a real alternative has appeared in the form of LakeHouse technologies, which in the past two years has been actively tested in projects in the Russian Federation, and it can already be considered quite stable for the implementation of large projects measuring hundreds of terabytes or more.

Andrei Matvienko, Deputy Director for Sales and Marketing of I-Teco, noted the trend towards the formation of its own complex ecosystems by Russian manufacturers due to growing demand in 2023-2024.

More companies from the "real sector" began to show interest in comprehensive access control solutions at the junction of IAM and IDM, said Aleksei Khmelnytsky, CEO of RooX, which specializes in authentication, authorization and development of web platforms for the corporate sector.

{{quote| Customers' approach to product selection also changed in 2024. If earlier companies chose point solutions for individual tasks, today systems come to the fore that, according to the principle of one window, close the tasks of authorization and authentication, "said Aleksei Hmelnitsky.}}

Among the new technological trends in the market in 2024, one can single out the digital ruble and digital financial assets, says Vasily Kuts, director of industry solutions at commercial banks K2Tekh. Some companies look at 2025 as the beginning of a full-scale implementation of CFA in the world and in Russia, and are actively preparing interesting ideas for implementation, said Nikolai Nikolenko, STO KODE.

Despite the fact that quantum and blockchain technologies are at the development stage, in 2024 IT companies began to experiment more actively with quantum computing to solve complex problems. Blockchain continues to find application in various areas, including finance and supply chain management, Andrey Malafeev, a representative of the Ramax group of companies, shared his observations.

During 2024, IT services related to import substitution, information security, the transition to cloud technologies, and support for systems of foreign vendors that left the Russian market were in greatest demand. IT audit, PAC implementation and other areas were also popular.

Exit from the market of foreign vendors began to threaten the reality of business more, the negative consequences became more visual. Skeptics assessed the real risks and possible benefits and reached the task of replacing software. Often these systems belong to the list of business-critical ones, the replacement of which is difficult, risky, but at the same time, according to business estimates, necessary.

There is an increase in interest in local databases and other import-substituting solutions, for example, in the field of public procurement, where the transition to Russian software is mandatory. The demand for services related to the implementation and maintenance of Russian software products, including office solutions, document management systems and VKS (system integration and software support), has also grown. Audit and consulting in the field of import substitution is relevant.

In the field of information security, services for the implementation of modern solutions in the field of information protection, risk management and compliance with regulatory standards are in demand. Against the backdrop of growing cybersecurity threats, outsourcing DBMS monitoring and support for DevOps solutions are popular.

The transition to cloud technologies and their integration with local IT systems is in demand. The development and implementation of hybrid cloud solutions, as well as services for data migration to the cloud, are relevant. The latter relate to both the transfer of certain parts of the infrastructure and the organization of fault-tolerant sites in the cloud. Companies that have used cloud technologies from foreign manufacturers are actively transferring their data and systems to domestic cloud platforms.

High demand is noted for servicing foreign solutions, especially in the enterprise segment, which is due to the slow migration to domestic software.

In the new reality, companies strive to optimize their internal processes and make sure that the existing infrastructure is reliable, for which they often resort to IT audits, identify IT landscape problems, consult on digital transformation, develop IT strategies, finalize or replace individual systems and tools.

Many people are interested in improving data analytics and implementing solutions for integrating disparate systems. The Process Intelligence methodology and technology is promising, CI/CD technology is in demand. There is a demand for everything that is somehow related to AI, processing and analyzing big data.

There is anxiety about a decline in native mobile services, where there is either stagnation or a slight collapse in volumes. The reason is the inability to place applications in stores for many large customers due to sanctions.

There is an interest in strengthening teams by individual specialists in "1C," mobile development, analytics and testing. In backend development, high demand was for ETL/DWH developers, for C++ developers and classic development with a standard technology stack. Demand for IT outsourcing services remains.

An expert review of the events of the IT services and IT outsourcing market in 2023-2024 gives a picture of a difficult but progressive development. Optimists and pessimists disagree on the volume of orders (from 15 billion to 3.5 trillion rubles), noting the presence of growth and slowdown trends in certain segments.

Technological optimists expect the widespread use of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, the formation of a segment of integrated enterprise data management from data warehouses to ML datasets, the introduction of Internet of Things systems and cloud services into the business process management loop of enterprises. Some experts predict the development of Self-Service BI systems, in which not only external consultants, but also employees of the company carrying out the transition will take part in the migration to new business intelligence systems.

Technological pessimists note the slowdown in the processes of switching to domestic software, customer skepticism in relation to open source systems due to the realization that this is not easy, not cheap, requires the involvement of qualified developers. There is a desire to outsource more key segments of the organization's IT structure, including those that were not previously included in this area: information security systems, server infrastructure, software and hardware systems, and data warehouses.

Almost unanimously, experts note as dominants in the IT services and outsourcing market in 2024 difficulties with attracting loans, a shortage of qualified personnel.