IT_ONE: 2024 should be the year of effective tandems

Sergey
Resonance

Companies, the leaders of their industries, have begun to actively develop their own products and solutions

For more than twenty years, large customers of digital solutions in various industries in our country have relied mainly on a foreign technology stack. Representatives of various industries - finance, industry, power, telecom, retail and others - introduced SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Western logistics, billing, exchange, trading systems, etc. Thanks to them, they developed their own IT infrastructure, provided services and support to their clients on the basis of foreign software, ensured efficiency and at the same time increased their own level of digital competencies.

Paradigm shift

Over the past years, and especially the last two years, the strategy has changed dramatically. Many Western solutions are not available, for a number of products it is impossible to receive updates, the costs of their operation and support have increased. In this regard, companies, leaders of their industries, began to actively develop the development of their own products and solutions. Today, they are expanding their own IT units, attaching entire off-the-shelf teams within M&A, as well as bringing in external contractors who also bring them missing expertise and strengthen competencies. Due to such serious work, companies successfully maintain the existing IT infrastructure and implement new projects - related to the import substitution of core systems, CRM, project management systems, application solutions, including the creation of new own products.

The budgets of large "non-digital" companies for the development of IT solutions and services have increased significantly, and the surge in demand for IT specialists has led to an increase in the shortage of qualified personnel.

Industrial players, already having a large number of mature, tested on internal customers of their own systems, began to think about the possibility of producing their developments, how to promote and present them on the market. This allows them, among other things, to increase efficiency and expand the functionality of products with new user experience, partially compensate for the costs of internal implementations. Thus, today a large number of developers from among the "non-digital" companies (industrial players) expect that some solutions originally created for internal needs can become popular and commercially successful in the foreign market.

Most often, these solutions are presented in the format of comprehensive software platforms - a set of digital tools available for implementation in various industries. An example is, for example, a digital platform Sberbank for developing business solutions, Platform V THE PLATFORM from MTS a vendor from software NOTE IT the holding T1 and many others. For end customers, these are very interesting and promising solutions, the quality of which is guaranteed by the reputation of a trusted developer, and reliability, as a rule, is provided by the vendor's special attention to the security of the solution and support for the concept of technological independence. The attention of customers to such proposals is increased due to the limited budgets for digitalization and the lack of access to the usual software products of global suppliers.

Synergy Bet

So, platform solutions are becoming a new trend in the development of the Russian IT industry. At the same time, developers of such platforms often have difficulties with the promotion, implementation and maintenance of their products by customers. They have internal competencies for project implementation, but little practice in dealing with the market and commercializing developments. They also face a shortage of IT specialists - implementation engineers, system architects, project managers, etc. Under these conditions, a competent partnership between an industrial vendor and a company with experience in custom development and implementation can be very advantageous. When creating a solution, the attracted specialists receive expertise and when market customers appear for the product, they can quickly connect to the project and begin its development and implementation.

For example, IT_ONE, a company engaged in custom development, has extensive experience in the implementation and comprehensive support of domestic solutions, as well as the migration of digital resources of customers from foreign platforms to Russian ones. Thanks to the close relationship with both customers and vendors, the company's specialists have a good understanding of the current needs of the former and the possibilities of the latter.

In turn, as colleagues and partners of developers, IT_ONE specialists increase their competencies and knowledge of their products, participate in their creation and development, and in the future become a reliable provider of these solutions to end new customers. Including - this also applies to complex, highly loaded systems that were previously used for internal needs, and now they need to be significantly improved for commercialization.

In particular, over the past few years, IT_ONE teams have been involved in the development of complex solutions for, financial sector,,, etc logistics retail states. In May 2023, IT_ONE joined the association of companies ""software developers of Russia Russoft to strengthen productive interaction and exchange expertise with leading market players.

The spread of such tandems of large industrial players and software developers working in synergy in today's conditions may become a key driver of digitalization in many sectors of the Russian economy.