IT outsourcing (Russian market)

Outsourcing is an opportunity to free up the organizational, financial and human resources of an enterprise to develop new directions, or to concentrate efforts on existing ones that require increased attention.

Pluses

• It is enough to have a compact "brain center"
• Transition from administration to more efficient functional management
• Engagement of partner competence. The partner is the one who knows how to do what I don't know how to do myself.
• With a reduction in the number of essential workers, the number of auxiliary workers is reduced, and indirect costs are reduced.
• Compact and transparent budget
• The problems of staff search, personnel management, the problem of the "human factor" go to the side of the partner

Minuses

• Expenses from the investment category are transferred to the category of operational expenses (decrease in capitalization)
• You need to look for a partner. Reference visits, pilot projects.
• You need to formulate and monitor Service Level Requirements (SLAs)
• Possible dependency on partner
• In the eyes of management, the compact IT department does not look very solid

Myths?

• At the same time, myths that with this approach the level of information security decreases, qualifications are lost, etc., are completely insignificant.
• The right outsourcer looks after his reputation and picks up a strong team. He has significantly more opportunities and resources to protect your data and to attract and motivate the most qualified personnel. At the same time, he has much more opportunities to find and implement the most progressive technologies.

Examples of outsourcing

• development of the corporate information system
• outsourcing store maintenance
• Create and manage a service desk service for your company

Classification of services Outsourcing Infastructure

• Data Center Services
• Network Outsourcing
• End User Device Outsourcing
• SaaS

• Outsourcing Business Application Support

• Commercial Application Outsourcing (Commercial Application Outsourcing)
• Custom Application Outsourcing (Custom Application Outsourcing)

• Outsourcing business processes

• CRM
• Finance and Accounting
• Human Resources
• Supply Management
• IT

Feasibility of outsourcing

• Market Maturity for Customer Company
  • For mature markets (contractors, customers) - the transition to outsourcing will bring significant cost savings, increase the manageability and reliability of the business
  • For emerging and emerging markets, for large companies - transition to the CSR model within companies, for small and medium-sized companies - market testing, innovation

• Market instability
• Low referrals with less than 50% workload - it is inefficient to keep on staff
• The need to improve the efficiency of the organization

Ideal customer

• Experience in the company with CSCs or individual outsourced processes
• SLAs and their measurement methods have been created and developed
• The company is focused on improving efficiency, cost optimization
• There is a need to increase the security of the core business

The Perfect Performer

• 24*7
• Network of distributed offices by region to minimize cost
• Front offices for work near customers
• Critical mass of employees (200 +) to compensate for fluctuations in needs
• Experience and proven technologies of internal processes

Corporate Equipment Service (Russian Market)

Main article: Corporate equipment service (Russian market)

2024: The Russian IT outsourcing market grew by 22% over the year

In 2024, the volume of the Russian market reached IToutsourcing 262 billion. rubles This is 22% more compared to 2023, when the costs in the relevant area were estimated at 214 billion rubles. Industry trends are addressed in the BusinesStat survey published in late January 2025.

IT outsourcing is a partial or complete transfer of work on the support, maintenance and modernization of the IT infrastructure of a company specializing in the provision of information technology services and with a staff of specialists of various qualifications. BusinesStat notes that such a model helps improve the quality of business functions by transferring complex and specific tasks to a third-party company. Outsourcing is particularly effective in areas such as software development, financial accounting, legal support, marketing and sales, business administration.

The published data takes into account administrative outsourcing, web hosting, development and maintenance, software as well as other IT services, outsourcing including infrastructure outsourcing, network outsourcing and managed services. Among the significant players in MTS the Russian market are named Digital LLC, JSC, Jet Infosystems LLC, Rubitech JSC, etc I-Teco.

The study says that even before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, industries such as healthcare, finance and personnel management were actively introducing digital technologies to optimize business processes and projects. At the same time, organizations often concluded contracts for the performance of work with contractors. The pandemic has prompted companies to move to digital business continuity solutions at an accelerated pace. Due to the lack of its own IT specialists and high-quality software products, enterprises began to resort to hiring third-party teams more often. The pandemic also contributed to the transition to remote work, which is why the demand for cloud platforms began to grow rapidly. In addition, amid the growing number of cyber attacks, the demand for IT outsourcing in the field of cybersecurity to protect confidential data has increased. During the pandemic, the number of cybercrimes increased significantly, but most companies did not have enough resources to combat intrusions. All of these factors have had a positive impact on the industry. If in 2020 the costs in the Russian IT outsourcing market amounted to 144 billion rubles, then in 2021 they reached 174 billion rubles, which corresponds to an increase of 21%.

However, in 2022, against the background of a worsening geopolitical situation, there was a fall of 3% with a final result of 169 billion rubles. Due to the sanctions, foreign customers who previously actively used the services of Russian IT specialists began to look for alternative services in other markets, which negatively affected the volume of revenue. In addition, internal economic problems, such as high levels inflations and volatility of the course, have put an additional strain on IT outsourcing companies. ruble Against this background, technical specialists began to study new employment opportunities.

However, in 2023, the industry returned to growth, showing an increase of 27% - up to 214 billion rubles. In general, in 2023-2024, the turnover of the IT outsourcing market in Russia increased by 49%. The key factors contributing to the rapid development of the sector are the need for import substitution and optimization of business processes. In addition, an increase in the number of orders for short-term outsourcing projects is recorded, for example, for the mass migration of jobs from one version of the operating system to another.^[1]

2023

IT outsourcing market in Russia: a steady growth trend

IT outsourcing in Russia by the beginning of 2023

Services for the maintenance and technical support of software and equipment, custom development, as well as testing of software products, which TAdviser classifies as the IT outsourcing segment, have been in demand among Russian businesses for several years. The growth of this market was not prevented by either the coronavirus pandemic or the change in the geopolitical situation in connection with the start of the SVO.

In 2022, experts noted a surge in interest in IT outsourcing, as it provided them with flexibility and speed of reaction to external changes and defended investment. More than one third of Russian companies said that they began to use IT outsourcing services more often. These are the results of a joint study by TADviser and Innovative People.

The Russian IT outsourcing market has grown by 10-20%, and the cost of such services has grown by an average of 15%, "says Dmitry Kochanov, CEO of Mons (Korus Consulting Group of Companies ).

He considers the drivers of such growth, firstly, the unstable economic situation, forcing companies not to expand their teams of IT specialists, but to shift part of their tasks to an external partner. Secondly, there is a shortage of highly qualified IT specialists who are not enough to close the needs of companies from different sectors of the economy in IT competencies. Thirdly, the growth of the IT outsourcing market was facilitated by the course towards digitalization, which requires the business to implement and develop various IT tools.

The Director of Development and Digital Transformation RDTECH Evgeny Osminin adds to this list of market growth drivers the demand that arose in 2022 to support the "sanctions" IT infrastructures and increase the cost of this support, especially in the hardware component.

In 2022, not only foreign vendors left the Russian IT market, but also foreign integrators who served international business in Russia and offered IT outsourcing services, "says Alexander Kazakov, Deputy Director of the Outsourcing and System Administration Department of Jet Infosystems.

Experts also remind that employees of Russian branches of foreign companies switched to work mainly in IT companies and thereby expanded their expertise. On the one hand, it is not so easy for customer companies to attract specialists with competencies in supporting the technological stacks of departed manufacturers. They are in short supply. On the other hand, it makes no sense to prepare them for the market, since in the future these stacks will not be used to build information and technological solutions, notes Andrey Kelmanzon, managing partner of the Outsourcing and Services segment of IBS.

Largest IT Outsourcers

Jet Infosystems became the leader in the new rating of IT outsourcers prepared in 2023 based on the results of reporting for 2022. Its revenue from outsourcing services increased by 4% and exceeded 18 billion rubles. The second line of the rating is at the Digital Economy League (17.5 billion rubles, + 58.5%). The third place was taken by I-Teco, its revenue decreased by 30.9% to 10.6 billion rubles.

In total, over 60 companies took part in the ranking. Their total revenue exceeded 127 billion rubles. Positive dynamics was noted in 48 companies of the rating, 15 participants showed negative dynamics.

The full version of the rating is available in the article The largest IT outsourcers in Russia > > >.

Contradictions of the Year

Having turned out to be cut off from convenient and familiar services of global suppliers, some large Russian companies decided to make the most of the capabilities of their own development teams to support the IT infrastructure and abandon outsourcing in favor of insourcing.

And the other part of the business has relied on partnerships.

Replacing IT support for departed foreign vendors with support for an IT integrator is one of the brightest trends in 2023, says Dmitry Kochanov.

Specialized suppliers are engaged to solve non-standard or complex problems.

This maintains parity in support costs and the internal team, − explains Vladimir Boyko, technical director of iTango.

Customers have taken a more thorough approach to selecting an IT outsourcer than before, including using clearer evaluation criteria to select a contractor and making increasingly qualified demands.

For example, with regard to IT service companies, customers are now concerned not only with the possible number and experience of the project team, that is, a high level of competence and/or readiness to quickly acquire the necessary competencies, say, to service non-standard software, but also the geography of the service provided - the presence of engineers throughout the Russian Federation, organization of processes and conditions for providing the service of the proper level, - explains Anton Nechuyev, Development Director of ITL.

At the same time, to solve difficult tasks in the field of supporting the existing IT infrastructure, and especially its migration to the new technological stack, skilled personnel alone are not enough.

We need methodological and technical bases that help scale and ensure the manageability and efficiency of rapidly growing teams, "says Evgeny Grachev, CEO of RNT Group.

According to the expert, the optimal model is the model in which resource outsourcing and outsourcing are combined on a project or service basis. In practice, it is implemented in the format of a dedicated development center for the customer. Such a dedicated center involves the presence of IT specialists with the necessary qualifications and skills, consulting on the construction of an operating model and interaction between IT and business, as well as the formation of a team of managers, specialists and projects.

Another option for the interaction of the business and the outsourcing partner is the formation of joint project teams in such a way that after their completion, the customer's employees have all the necessary knowledge to independently develop and support the developed solutions.

This year, there was an increased demand for hybrid development, when the developers of the customer and the vendor work together on the task. Today, outstaffing in the hybrid development format is the best option for maintaining IT projects, which allows you to provide the necessary level of expertise in new areas, for example, in the access control segment, and at the same time maintain control over product development, − said Aleksei Khmelnytsky, CEO of RooX.

But nevertheless, Alexander Kazakov admits, most customers prefer to give only a part of their subsystems to support. So they are in demand for expert support services from Jet Infosystems, where only part of the infrastructure is in the integrator's area of ​ ​ responsibility, and if necessary, the client can contact him for expertise.

The customer's unwillingness to completely outsource support for their corporate IT lies in another contradiction between customers and integrators, or rather between integrated service and outsourcing of certain functions - databases, computing infrastructure.

Demand for comprehensive outsourcing is falling, − said Vasily Sautin, head of the sales directorate, IBS− the main demand is observed in terms of outsourcing competencies.

Key trend

Nevertheless, the conditions that have developed in the Russian information technology market as a whole, and in the IT outsourcing market in particular, have collectively formed a steady growth trend for the coming years.

Analysts at Strategy Partners predict that by 2030 the IT market in Russia will reach 7 trillion rubles, of which 2.8 trillion will fall on the IT services and software segments.

Market players expect an increase in demand for outsourcing of certain functions and for services of the first and second line of technical support. Import substitution of the technological stack will continue, which means that the provision of related services under the outsourcing model will continue to be in demand.

Lack of resources in the market leads to the fact that the customer forms a request for the involvement of competence under management. In some cases, this is possible, in some cases not. This demand was clearly observed this year, − Andrei Kelmanzon is sure.

At the same time, IT outsourcing service providers, delving especially into many different software products of Russian development and applying them in projects, significantly expand their competencies as integrators and improve the quality of their own developments, introduce innovations into their own business processes.

Thus, the company "Jet Infosystems" used the machine learning system on the 1st support line. According to Alexander Kazakov, when registering an appeal, she analyzes the context of the application and sends it for execution to the desired group, independently assigning its priority. The system handles its responsibility with almost 100% accuracy and frees technical support employees from routine operations in this area of ​ ​ work.

In short, analysts predict the growth of the IT outsourcing market, and market participants are doing everything to ensure that this forecast is justified.

Go to the main page of the overview "IT Services and IT Outsourcing Market in Russia" > > >

IT outsourcing regulations in financial institutions will be enshrined in legislation

The State Duma Committee on the Financial Market recommended the adoption in the first reading of a bill that provides for providers of information technology outsourcing services the obligation to keep secret about transactions, accounts and deposits of clients and correspondents of credit institutions. For the disclosure of such information, they will face liability, including compensation for the damage caused to the victims.

In general, "it is proposed to give the right to financial organizations on the basis of outsourcing to transfer the possibility of digital service of credit institutions, ensuring their information protection," quotes the words of the co-author of the document, head of the State Duma Committee on the financial market Anatoly Aksakov "Parliamentary newspaper."

The purpose of the bill is to improve the legal framework for outsourcing information technologies and the use of services by financial organizations, representatives of the press service of State Duma deputy Anton Nemkin told TAdviser on November 15, 2023.

The document proposes to consider as providers of IT outsourcing services and cloud services the holders of a license to carry out activities for the technical protection of confidential information, which provide such services on the basis of an agreement. Such activities can be carried out in accordance with the requirements established by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.

The bill is planned to be considered at a plenary meeting on November 28, 2023.

The State Duma IT Committee prepared an opinion on this bill, in which it pointed out a number of points that require clarification or adjustment. So, according to Anton Nemkin, a member of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, first of all, it should be noted that the document does not provide for any mechanism of state control and supervision by authorized federal executive bodies over compliance with the law by providers of information technology outsourcing services and cloud services.

Among other things, the bill also assumes that securities market participants, non-state pension funds, credit rating agencies, credit organizations, insurance organizations, pawnshops and microfinance organizations are given the right to entrust outsourcing service providers with the placement, storage and other processing of information that is collected as part of their activities, without obtaining the consent of the persons to whom this information refers.

"It is necessary to specify the information about which persons will be placed, stored and processed by outsourcing service providers without obtaining their consent, as well as what is the composition of such information. If the placement and processing of personal data of citizens is supposed, then their processing in all cases is carried out with the consent of the subject in accordance with the Federal Law "On Personal Data," Nemkin recalled.

Given that personal data of Russians may be subject to processing, it is necessary to provide for the bill that service providers can only be persons under the control of Russian entities, and are also confident in the IT committee. But foreign participation, including foreign states and territories that commit unfriendly actions against the Russian Federation, should be limited.

As Nemkin emphasized, it needs additional study and restriction for providers of outsourcing services of information technologies and cloud services on the processing of information constituting state secrets.

"In the current version, these suppliers will be able to process information constituting any other types of secrets - commercial, private life, official, medical, lawyer, notary and others," the parliamentarian added.

In general, the terminology of the draft law also requires refinement, since it proposes to use the concepts of terms that are common to all organizations, and not only for those specified, for organizations supervised by the Bank of Russia. It is also advisable to limit the regulation of the bill only in relation to those financial organizations for which it is currently relevant, Nemkin concluded.

60% of companies have difficulty ensuring uninterrupted operation of IT infrastructure and business processes

On August 29, 2023, the company CROC shared the conclusions of the study "Key Trends in the 2023 Service Market." The results showed that 60% of companies have difficulty ensuring the smooth operation of the IT infrastructure and business processes. More than 100 companies (87 with revenues of more than 2 billion rubles) working in the field of retail and e-commerce, FMCG and agro-industrial complex, the financial sector, industry, fuel and energy complex, transport, logistics and services took part in the study.

Respondents put a personnel question in the first place in terms of the complexity of the decision (78%). Particularly lacking are experienced and skilled third-line support engineers. In second place (71% of respondents) are the difficulties of adapting to new conditions. This means changes in the market, changes in suppliers and distributors, conditions, terms of purchase and supply of equipment. 65% of companies face problems when integrating solutions from various vendors. 52% of respondents noted complaints about the immaturity of the service of Russian manufacturers, which often lack competencies and experience, there is no standardization.

All this caused radical changes in IT landscape support schemes compared to 2021. 56% of the companies surveyed in 2023 gave the infrastructure for service to a local service partner (which is 27% more than in 2021). Now the key criteria for his choice have become the competence of engineers and the completeness of the spare parts warehouse, and the price has dropped to third place, although it previously topped the list. Before the departure of foreign vendors, 47% of the surveyed companies gave infrastructure to them for support. As of August 2023, the share of direct vendor support is only 12%. A third of companies accompany infrastructure entirely on their own.

"The survey of representatives of large companies clearly demonstrates the changes that have occurred in the service support market due to the departure of foreign vendors. Thus, the share of services provided to companies by vendors directly decreased by 35%. This is due to the fact that in two years direct vendor contracts have flowed into contracts with local service partners, "said Natalia Slyadneva, head of the CROC computing infrastructure service.

During the study, CROC analyzed market requests for 2021-2023 for service support for data centers, IT infrastructure and business applications.

In 2023, demand for support for data center engineering systems is recovering, although in 2022 customers gave priority to the computing and network infrastructure service. Most often, companies apply for comprehensive data center service (almost half of the companies). The demand for the service of uninterrupted power supply systems, automation and dispatching, air conditioning systems is also growing. The equipment in the data center has a huge number of resource components that need to be changed in a timely manner, monitor the state of the entire fleet and regularly maintain it. When choosing a service partner, companies strive to ensure that one provider can do this, "said Sergey Paukov, Director of the Department of Engineering and Multimedia Systems of the CROC. - In 2024-25, demand is expected to increase for the service of data center engineering systems, including new infrastructure and support for alternative vendors.

Analyzing requests for IT infrastructure support (computing and network equipment, system software, etc.), we saw that this segment is in greatest demand. In 2022, about 60% of incoming requests to the CROC fell on the infrastructure service. In addition, over the year, the number of support equipment in CROC increased by 2 times, and the team of engineers increased by a third. The current market situation is such that 95% of companies continue to support the existing infrastructure and strive to maximize its service life. However, at the same time, the growth of demand for testing alternative solutions - both Russian and Asian manufacturers - became a distinctive trend of this year. According to our estimates, this year the number of testing requests has grown 3 times. Moreover, there are already projects for the introduction of alternative solutions. And this is an indicator of not just lively interest, but confidence among customers in the functionality of new solutions, - said Valentin Gubarev, Deputy General Director for Business Development, Director of the Department of Infrastructure Solutions and Services of the CROC.

The key trend in supporting business solutions is more than a twofold increase in demand for managed services and placement in. cloud At the same time, redistribution occurs: IT market new vendors, distributors and service companies appear. And as of August 2023, more than 86% of customers are testing new, alternative solutions in terms of. ON There is also a trend towards independent creation of software by customers and adaptation of open source solutions, since 47% of companies experience difficulties in finding rare specialized software on the market. In addition, we see a very high demand for testing integration solutions for. contact centers

According to the results of the analysis of the dynamics of the service support market for the period 2021-2023, CROC experts also found that in the first half of 2023 the number of incoming requests for the IT infrastructure service increased 1.5 times compared to the same period in 2022. In the context of industries, over the past two years, stable demand growth has been demonstrated by companies from the retail sector and FMCG (on average by 4% per year), IT (4%), services (1.5%) and the financial sector (1%).

A survey of representatives of large Russian companies conducted by CROC analysts showed that 56% do not have their own spare parts warehouse (spare parts, tools and accessories), which is necessary to provide IT infrastructure service. Listing the key challenges of 2023, the owners of spare parts warehouses noted complex logistics and an increase in delivery times (62%), the need to test the equipment that came in (56%), low quality spare parts (42%), as well as the search and order of rare equipment (25%).

"We also see an increase in demand for system software support. For the 1st half of 2023, the number of projects in this direction increased by about 60%. However, it should be noted that in terms of maintaining the stability of the software infrastructure, the main challenge was problems with software updates. More than 80% of customers faced them. Obviously, in the foreseeable future, this trend will not lose its relevance due to the lack of safe opportunities to buy licenses for software products. As of August 2023, there are few independent projects on the market on Russian vendors, in most cases they are implemented in parallel operation with existing solutions or within the pilot. Usually in corporations, the piloting stage of the solution lasts 1.5-2 years. Therefore, by 2025 we can confidently predict an increase in the number of completed migration projects to domestic software, "said Dmitry Emelyanov, head of the Support for System Software at CROC.

Russia will introduce regulation of IT outsourcing for banks

On July 24, 2023, it became known that the State Duma Council recommends the adoption of a bill that regulates the use of outsourcing information technologies and cloud services for financial organizations - banks, professional securities market participants, credit bureaus, etc.

According to the Kommersant newspaper, the initiative is aimed at solving the problem of "violations of equipment supply chains" in the credit and financial industry. This is planned to be achieved "by removing the legal restrictions inherent in the use of outsourcing." It is assumed, in particular, that banks and other players in the financial sector will receive the right, through outsourcing, to place, store, process information (with the exception of those classified as state secrets) without the consent of the persons to whom it belongs.

The Bank of Russia will establish requirements for companies providing technologies and services. Moreover, if the service provider is a member of the banking group, the requirement to have a license to carry out activities for the technical protection of confidential information may not apply to him. The Bank of Russia reported that a list of conditions for financial institutions to attract providers of IT outsourcing services and cloud services is in development.

However, industry participants express concerns that the adoption of the law in the proposed version could lead to the fact that the entire outsourcing market will be divided between the largest players included in the ecosystems of leading credit institutions. And the head of the board of the Association "Financial Innovations" Roman Prokhorov says that any formalized requirements will lead to an increase in prices for the services of certified suppliers.

In conditions that are not too high and tend to reduce the margin on financial services, this is not the most pleasant gift, especially for small participants in the financial market, "said Prokhorov.[2]

Russian companies outsource 10% of IT services

Russian companies outsource more than 10% of IT services. Such data from Trust Technologies (formerly PwC) were released on April 18, 2023.

As Kommersant writes with reference to this study, business outsources, including auditing the IT infrastructure, deploying protection systems, analyzing the situation and supporting decision-making when responding to incidents. The increase in the popularity of outsourcing was primarily the result of a shortage of personnel and a lack of own resources for Russian business, experts say.

According to specialists of the DLBI darknet monitoring service, the growing number of data leaks indicates the growing danger of IT outsourcing in terms of cybersecurity. The analysis shows that companies that transfer data processing to contractors or trust them to manage infrastructure are often worse protected, the DLBI noted.

Cyber ​ ​ attacks through IT contractors and supply chains today look like one of the most dangerous, Alexei Pavlov, director of business development at the Solar JSOC RTK-Solar cyber attack counteraction center, told the publication. According to him, in January-April 2023, the number of such attacks more than doubled, most often it is the suppliers of IT and information security services who have wide access to the client infrastructure that become the targets of attackers.

And if large IT and information security companies control their own security, then small contractors may have a low level of protection, he added.

Informzaschita confirmed to the newspaper (an article published on April 18, 2023) that in 2023 at least twice attacks were made on cybersecurity companies providing outsourcing services.

According to DLBI estimates, the volume of personal information of citizens illegally entered the network in the first quarter of 2023 exceeded 118 million unique records, which is 2.3 times more than in the same period in 2022.^[3]

2021-2022

The state of the Russian IT outsourcing market and its largest participants - TAdviser data

The IT outsourcing market in Russia shows positive dynamics in its development from year to year. Anton Pavlenko, Head of the IT Infrastructure and Outsourcing Directorate of Jet Infosystems, gave an estimate of its average annual growth rate - 10-15% per year.

The way out of the pandemic and pent-up demand had a positive effect on the growth of the IT services direction in 2021, − says Eduard Dolgalev, director of business development at Selecty Group. − Our IT outsourcing performance has grown significantly. The need for programmers was enormous: a programmer who entered the market received 5-7 job offers in a week. We were able to rebuild processes, which allowed us to provide customers with the necessary IT resources, despite the heated market.

Evgeny Ponomarenko, CEO of the international outsider agency for testing "Quotes" notes that in 2020-2021 "there was a feeling of constant growth." According to Vladimira Lvova, Director for Strategic Development of I-Teco, already in 2021, the transfer of corporate IT to outsourcing as a whole or large functional blocks became a noticeable phenomenon.

Largest IT Outsourcers

According to the results of 2021, Jet Infosystems became the leader in the Russian IT outsourcing market. Its revenue in this area reached 17.4 billion rubles, annual growth - 17.7%. The top three also included I-Teco and OTR companies.

In total, 52 companies took part in the ranking. Their total revenue exceeded 102 billion rubles. The new ranking lacks last year's leader, Lanit. In 2022, she did not disclose the indicators of her activities.

The full version of the rating is available in the article The largest IT outsourcers in Russia > > >.

Features of 2022

In 2022, large companies faced questions: how to combine current plans for the development of the existing IT infrastructure with measures to increase its import independence? And for some time they were forced to respond to them in the face of a lack of specialists with knowledge of Russian software products, as well as Open Source systems.

Among the significant trends that influenced the market, one can note the growth of the direction of service of Open Source systems, which are increasingly used by Russian customers. Now we are implementing several dozen projects using Open Source and we have accumulated competencies in 40 different open source solutions that can be used in the enterprise segment. Among them are Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Red Hat OpenShift, Redis, Ansible, ManageIQ, Zabbix, OpenSearch and others, - says Anton Pavlenko, Head of the IT Infrastructure and Outsourcing Directorate of Jet Infosystems.

Many customers have followed the path of IT outsourcing, transferring tasks that lack the competence and time of their internal IT services to professional teams.

Customers appreciated all the advantages of IT outsourcing to attract resources in software development, − notes Eduard Dolgalev. - Its use allowed them to adjust their plans several times in a year and manage resources flexibly. Budget optimization was achieved by attracting teams during the project, so there was no public news about the reduction of IT specialists. We observed several waves: customers and reduced, and increased production capacity for software development.

In 2022, providers of integrated IT infrastructure outsourcing services have a new group of customers. It was made up of Russian representative offices of companies that left the market, forced to transfer their IT infrastructure to the territory of our country in a short time.

At the same time, notes Victoria Bukhar, commercial director of LANIT-Integration (part of the LANIT group), the economic efficiency of outsourcing today raises some questions.

Now Russian enterprises are actively looking for contractors to support and develop their software and hardware systems. At the same time, the pricing of these services is still not clearly defined, − she says. − It is not clear whether it is beneficial for customers or outsourcing companies to work with the legacy landscape or it is easier to start a major IT update. I think the answer to this question will be an important factor affecting the IT market in 2023.

In addition, the departure of international vendors from the Russian market contributed to the creation of a situation alarming for large players in the IT outsourcing market. After him, a large number of experienced specialists with deep expertise in the field of foreign software products entered the market. And large credit and financial institutions, retail chains and players in the e-commerce market did not fail to take advantage of this.

This year, for example, retail chains have registered a record number of their own IT companies, − said Alexander Semenov, General Director of Korus Consulting Group of Companies.

And it must be admitted that this factor contributes to the strengthening of internal IT divisions and insourcing companies of large industry players.

It is impossible to say what the market will lead to, "− says Vladimir Lvov, director of strategic development at I-Teco, and adds that it is important to keep independent players so that the market does not turn out to be divided between insourcers of large financial and industrial groups.

Thus, it can be noted that the IT outsourcing market, including customers and providers of such services, is undergoing a structural restructuring and transformation in 2022, the outcome of which we may see next year.

Industry distribution of IT outsourcing projects

As of December 2022, the TAdviser database contains information on 2,288 IT outsourcing projects. Most of them fall on three industries - the public sector, financial services and trade. For more information, see the diagram below.

2020-2021

TAdviser data

IT Outsourcing Market Health, Drivers and Barriers

Recently, among the active players in the IT outsourcing market, there has been a rethinking of its value for business in the face of the complexity of the IT landscape and the emergence of innovative technologies such as robotization, Low Code and No Code development.

Summarizing the answers of the experts with whom TAdviser spoke, the drivers of the IT outsourcing market include:

• shortage of qualified personnel at enterprises;
• the increasing need of the state for IT services, digital transformation programs and a vector for import substitution;
• Increased availability, efficiency and information security of third-party services
• Increasing the need to optimize business processes while wanting to save money
• if earlier information technology was considered, mainly, only as necessary costs, now there is a noticeable change in the attitude towards IT as a generator of business value;
• entry of insourcing companies into the open market.

A number of companies saw new ways of development in a difficult post-pandemic situation and such companies accelerated the processes of digital transformation. If some consider the unstable situation in the economy to be a barrier to outsourcing, then others consider IT outsourcing demand to be a factor in growth. A feature of the situation, many experts consider close ties with the outsourcer team, when the latter actually becomes part of the customer's IT team.

There are also notable barriers to IT outsourcing, in particular, such phenomena as:

• the difficult situation in the economy, which is further complicated by the general background of uncertainty;
• Long-term planning difficulties;
• insufficient managerial maturity, when it is difficult for the company's management to determine what to outsource and what not to do.

Experts also note that state regulation can simultaneously be both a driver and a barrier to the market, for example, direct bans on the transfer of some processes to outsourcing. There are also implicit obstacles.

Let's see what the experts of the most active companies in the Russian IT industry say about the state, dynamics and trends of IT outsourcing.

Rustem Khayretdinov, Growth Director of BI.Zone (Secure Information Zone, Bison), does not see any differences between the growth of outsourcing and the growth of the rest of the IT market. In his opinion, the drivers for IT outsourcing are the same - a lack of qualified personnel and the preservation of the budget, and the barriers include insufficient managerial maturity, which does not yet allow determining what exactly should be outsourced and what should not be outsourced. Many other experts note the difficult situation with personnel: Alexey Mishin, director of the SAPRUN Center for Applied Development, Alexey Parfentiev, head of analytics at SearchInform. This, in their opinion, is the main driver of outsourcing.

Andrey Geshel, director of the Jet Infosystems service center, says about changing the attitude towards IT and understanding the value of IT outsourcing as the main driver of its growth. In addition, in his opinion, the driving force behind the growth of IT outsourcing is the penetration of open source software into large businesses. Andrei Geschel refers to the barriers of IT outsourcing as a difficult situation in the economy and its uncertainty.

Mikhail Rozhkov, an expert at PARMA TG, notes the role of insourcing companies that seek to enter the open market and become outsourcers in relation to third-party companies. He also notes that the number of competent specialists is growing slower than the demand for their services.

Gleb Korsunov, Director of Business Development at HolyWeb, talks about barriers to outsourcing, as well as those actions that should be taken to overcome them:

• In order to attract highly qualified migrants, in his opinion, it would be worth creating special conditions for obtaining a residence permit and citizenship.
• High taxes in the form of VAT for small and medium-sized businesses, which imports IT services to solve production problems due to a shortage of personnel in the market. These taxes need to be reduced.
• The focus of IT services sales on the domestic market, which is very small compared to the global one.
• Falling real incomes of the population, increasing competition.
• Competition with the international employer market, which significantly affects wage growth. Many foreign companies pay specialists linked to foreign currencies, making them more attractive.
• Outflow of qualified specialists (migration). Russian companies should be able to "land" personnel in an office in another country.

Regarding the instability of economic conditions, experts were divided. If some consider the unstable situation in the economy to be a barrier to outsourcing, then others consider IT outsourcing demand in Russia to be a factor in growth. This is the opinion, for example, of Svetlana Vrublevskaya, Deputy Director of the Telecommunications Department for Service of the IT company CROC. She says that with the massive transition to remote work, many companies faced the need to quickly solve new IT tasks that they were not ready for, which caused an increase in demand for third-party IT services. She believes that increasingly, an external IT service provider is actually becoming part of the customer's team.

The nature of IT outsourcing is changing today, notes Sergei Solovyov, Deputy General Director of ICL Group. The Customer shall conduct a thorough review of the service providers prior to contracting and shall be deeply involved in the hiring processes of the employees on their side. Sergey, like many interviewed experts, notes a difficult situation with personnel.

There are experts who do not note a significant growth in the IT outsourcing market, for example, Vladimir Leonov, technical director of AMT Group, says that the market has froze at the "dock" mark. The reason for this is the lack of a large segment of medium-sized businesses that could ensure the growth of the market for such services.

The demand for services related to maintaining IT systems or increasing a given level of availability, efficiency and information security is noted by Evgeny Yeltsov, Deputy General Director of Angara Professional Assistance and believes that this pushes the client to outsourcing.

Maxim Makovsky, Commercial Director of Tegrus, highlights the growing role of the state as a market player and the vector for import substitution as an IT outsourcing driver. He believes that the IT outsourcing market has grown and expanded by increasing the need for companies to optimize business processes and implement new approaches and solutions while wanting to save money. Maxim also notes qualitative changes: there are more non-standard design tasks, the processes of interaction with business have changed, new prospects for development have appeared and, in general, confidence in IT outsourcing companies has increased.

Alexander Rozhkov, Product and Technology Director of T1 Group, estimates the costs of companies for business transformation and innovation, including IT outsourcing, up to 30-40% of their IT budgets and notes such IT outsourcing growth drivers as the spread of DevOps, Low Code and No Code platforms, and software development based on container technologies. He notes important state initiatives that contribute to the growth of IT companies, for example, their inclusion in the list of enterprises with a continuous production cycle that are allowed to work during the lockdown period. And also notes the general trend for the industry that IT is increasingly considered not as a cost item, but as a generator of business value.

Alexander Egorov, CEO of Reksoft, considers the main driver of the market to be the increased interest of companies in digitalizing processes, and this is happening both in government organizations and in commercial structures. In his opinion, these processes are seriously stimulated by state investment through import substitution, which further accelerates the development of the IT market. Alexander Egorov points to the main barrier to the development of IT outsourcing - an acute shortage of IT specialists. He says that other obstacles are solved, especially since in 2021 there was an active interaction between the Ministry of Digital Development and the Ministry of Industry and Trade with representatives of IT-Business and specialized associations.

Ventra IT experts believe that if small companies are inclined to completely outsource almost all of their IT functions, then large businesses (including government agencies) outsource support services only to individual business processes or functions.

State regulation can simultaneously be both a driver and a barrier to the market, according to Alexey Parfentiev, head of analytics at SearchInform. In addition to direct bans on the transfer of some processes to outsourcing, he says, there are also implicit obstacles. Often, customers do not have an understanding of how to properly comply with the law, so they behave extremely carefully, seeking the help of outsourcers.

Ilya Nabatov, Production Director T1 Consulting, considers IT outsourcing to be one of the most dynamic segments in the IT services market. It highlights two main drivers: digital transformation programs and import substitution.

Sergey Shilov, President of the Digital Economy League and Managing Partner of AT Consulting, also refers to the outsourcing market as captive IT companies (subsidiary functional structures) and notes the emergence of more such companies. The popularity of captive companies is both a barrier (a very large number of orders remain there) and a driver for the market (some of the work is still given to third-party commercial structures).

Industry distribution of IT outsourcing projects

As of the end of 2021, the TAdviser database contains information on more than 2 thousand IT outsourcing projects. According to these data, most often outsourcing projects are implemented in the public sector, financial services and trade. In total, these industries account for about 38% of all well-known projects. For more information, see the diagram below.

Market Dynamics Estimates

Estimates of the growth rate of the outsourcing market from experts surveyed by TAdviser are very different. This can be explained, among other things, by various understandings of what exactly should be attributed to IT outsourcing. Thus, the dynamics at the end of 2020, experts estimated in the range from 3 to 20%. At the same time, the forecast of dynamics in 2021 showed noticeable improvements in the situation in the field of IT outsourcing. The range of forecast estimates for the growth of this market was already from 7.5 to 40%.

Here are some of the most characteristic estimates.

The IT outsourcing market is in an active phase of growth, said Ilya Nabatov, Production Director T1 Consulting. He estimates the growth of 2020 at about 10%, and expects 2021 with a plus of 15-20%.

Gleb Korsunov, Business Development Director of Holy Web, gives the highest estimate of revenue growth in the IT outsourcing sector from 30 to 50% in 2021 and believes that the same dynamics will continue in 2022, since long-term contracts and won tenders in 2021 will continue to bring revenue in 2022.

Sergey Dzavaryan, Director of Business Development at Innovative People, notes the steady growth of the IT outsourcing market, mainly resource, and predicts a steady growth of this segment in 2022. The main request for resource outsourcing, as in 2020, according to Sergey's observations, comes from banks. Most of them create their own ecosystems based on microservice architecture. Thanks to this, Sergei believes that the Russian banking sector is the most technological in the world, however, this requires a large number of IT specialists. Therefore, banks attract outsourcing companies. The main catalysts for the growth of IT outsourcing, says Sergey Dzavaryan, will still be banks and insurance companies, however, the participation of other industries, in particular, retail and the oil and gas sector, will increase.

Andrei Geshel, director of the Jet Infosystems service center, says that in 2020 the IT outsourcing market increased by an average of 5%, and in 2021, in his opinion, a result of 7-10% is expected.

Rustem Khayretdinov, Growth Director of BI.ZONE, estimates market growth (except for IT outsourcing custom software development) by 20% per year in 2020 and 2021 and believes that this trend will continue over the next few years.

Alexander Egorov, CEO of Reksoft, estimates the volume of the Russian IT market, including IT outsourcing, at 2.46 trillion rubles in 2020, its growth was 20.6%, and the Russian software market reached 247.6 billion rubles in 2020, an increase of 16% in rubles. Reksoft in 2020 showed revenue growth of 20%. Alexander believes that this year the software market will show the same dynamics.

A number of experts assess the growth of the market not so optimistic, although a small increase is still noted. For example, Maxim Makovsky, Commercial Director of Tegrus, sees the growth of the Russian IT outsourcing market by an average of 5-6% per year, with the exception of 2020, when due to the pandemic, market growth slowed down to 3%, but believes that by the end of 2021, the Russian IT outsourcing market may increase by 8-9% compared to 2020.

Largest IT Outsourcers

outsourcing The company became the leader in the rating of the Russian IT services market, prepared in 2021 by the end of 2020. LANIT Its revenue from this direction reached 24.9 billion rubles. The top 5 rankings also included companies,,, and I-Teco Jet Infosystems. Digital Economy League CROC

The full version of the rating is available in the article The largest IT outsourcers in Russia > > >.

Key Trends in the IT Outsourcing Market

The experts' responses pointed to various trends in IT outsourcing: technological, process and organizational.

The most notable technological trends include:

• widespread use of low-code software development solutions;
• growing demand for microservice solutions;
• Technical support for Open Source solutions
• development of mobile and web applications;
• outsourcing secure development;
• growing popularity of new destinations such as digital consulting;
• maintenance of hybrid and digital (smart) workplaces;
• monitoring and control of production based on the industrial Internet of Things.

It is worth highlighting the following process trends:

• IT outsourcers are gradually switching to remote service services for customer equipment;
• High demand for software developers, especially for financial sector solutions
• growth of cooperation of IT companies with universities, investments in internal educational programs;
• outsourcing not only IT services, but also business processes;
• product consulting.

Organizational trends include:

• Insourcing companies seek to enter the open market and become outsourcers to third-party companies;
• The number of projects to change the outsourcing provider to another is growing;
• acquisitions of outsourcing companies and hiring of collective goals;
• IT outsourcing and outstaffing from neighboring countries;
• entry of Russian IT companies to exchanges;
• Small businesses began to look closely at IT outsourcing.

Another type of trend can be distinguished in the answers: predictive, which include such future innovative solutions as predictive analytics, which allows you to detect anomalies in the operation of devices and equipment using neural networks.

Let's hear what experts say about current IT outsourcing trends.

Sergey Dzavaryan, Director of Business Development at Innovative People, highlights the main trend in 2021 - high demand for developers, especially for solutions in the financial sector. Due to this, the salaries of IT specialists are growing very quickly. Large companies in competition for developers significantly "accelerate" the salaries of the latter, which complicates the ability to hire qualified IT personnel in the SMB. The annual outflow of specialists abroad also affects, moreover, the specialist does not even physically leave the country, and work in a foreign company is not always paid higher than in the domestic one. According to Sergei, the developers consider work in international projects as the possibility of relocation in the future to Western countries, sacrificing material side for this. Sergey Dzavaryan also says that this trend will continue in the medium term. He notes that there is now an increased demand for java developers, but next year companies will have to reconsider the approach to choosing a software stack, as it has become very expensive to attract javists. In his opinion, the trend will begin to shift towards Python developers.

Natalia Dybko, Deputy General Director of I-Teco Innovation Center, adds that now a real struggle is unfolding for the best IT specialists. At the same time, the search for ways to select professionals, their further growth and retention in the company becomes an urgent task.

We expect the fight for talent to continue. Requests for IT outsourcing are constantly growing, so attracting highly qualified personnel is an important task. In parallel, the question arises of how to raise and hold this personnel. Each company has its own recipe for success, says Natalya Dybko.

Trends in IT outsourcing set changes in the IT landscape of large companies, "says Andrey Geshel, director of the Jet Infosystems service center. These changes affect the technological foundations of building IT systems, in particular, these are container technologies and many open source solutions. Open source software is not the easiest range of products for enterprises, notes Andrey. Even within a single company, multiple open source solutions are often used, and support for each requires specialized expertise. Therefore, customers willingly outsource support for such solutions. Andrey notes an increase in 25% of the number of open source solutions in his company. In particular, these are open source databases, Kubernetes containers, S3 cloud storage and configuration management systems. In his opinion, there is a separate trend in the development of mobile and web applications.

Mikhail Rozhkov, an expert at PARMA TG, considers the main outsourcing trend to be the increasingly widespread use of low-code software solutions that can solve increasingly complex problems. At the same time, he believes that the volume of traditional development will inevitably decrease.

Gleb Korsunov, Business Development Director of Holy Web, considers the import of IT servants, as well as outsourcing services and outstaffing IT personnel from neighboring countries as the main trend. Companies from neighboring countries plan to enter the Russian market and open their offices in Russia. This allows you to increase the volume of launched products and their quality, which in the future will create competitive advantages for government and business. In addition, according to Gleb, there are also such trends as:

• The opening of additional offices and competence centers in the regions of Russia, as well as in the CIS countries, due to a very strong personnel shortage.
• Increased cooperation of IT companies with universities and technical universities, the opening of joint laboratories, the development of training programs, etc. This allows the university to receive additional funding and state support.
• Increased investment in internal academies and educational programs.
• Taking over IT companies and their entire teams, hunting the entire team.
• IT companies go to exchanges, issue bonds in order to raise additional capital.

Outsourcing is most often transferred to those business functions that the company did not yet have and only planned to introduce them, - so says Rustem Khayretdinov, Growth Director of BI.ZONE, and adds that it is much more difficult and costly to pull out an already working function "with meat" and transfer it to outsourcing. Rustem sees an increase in demand for outsourcing the secure development function. The purchase of development tools in itself does not give anything, says the director of BI.ZONE, we still need qualified personnel and processes. This causes an increase in demand for personnel to work with development tools, or there is another way: immediately buy a finished product - safe code.

The director of BI.ZONE also shares the observation that if earlier outsourcing projects were simply the transfer of an IT function to an external provider, then in 2021 there were projects to transfer the service from one provider to another. He believes that such projects are easier, since the first provider is always chosen cheaper, processes and communications are debugged on it. Such experience leads to the emergence of new requirements for practical interaction. However, he notes, the IT outsourcing market remains immature while conservative habits are strong to have everything at home, which creates a false illusion of control. When implementing a function within its own infrastructure, says Rustem Khayretdinov, failures happen even more often than when outsourcing. However, at the same time, it is unlikely to compensate for the damage in the same way as if the outsourcer became the culprit of the accident, he concludes.

Svetlana Vrublevskaya, Deputy Director of the Telecommunications Department for Services of the CROC IT company, adds that in 2021 IT outsourcing becomes more flexible, it adjusts to modern business realities, systems are being developed that allow you to quickly optimize and increase the efficiency of business processes.

One of the main trends in IT outsourcing is long-term cooperation, in which companies outsource their IT functions. This observation is shared by Maxim Makovsky, commercial director of Tegrus. In addition, he points to business interest in outsourcing not only IT services, but also business processes. Maxim also believes that small businesses also began to look closely at IT outsourcing, as companies' automation and IT needs are growing much faster than the capabilities of IT departments within enterprises and organizations.

Along with traditional outsourcing services: maintenance and technical support of IT infrastructure, application support, network outsourcing, new areas are gaining popularity, such as digital consulting, servicing hybrid and digital (intelligent) workplaces, technical support for solutions based on Open Source, monitoring and control of production based on the industrial Internet of Things, ensuring the security of APCS, says Alexander Rozhkov, Director of Products and Technologies of the T1 Group. He believes that the leading position in IT outsourcing continues to be held by large system integrators and service, with deep expertise of certified specialists, a wide geographical presence, and small companies will not soon be able to create worthy competition for such companies. In addition, according to Alexander Rozhnov, the next evolutionary stage in the development of IT outsourcing is predictive analytics that allows you to identify anomalies in the operation of devices and equipment using neural networks and, thereby, carry out preventive maintenance in advance, prevent failures in critical business systems.

Alexander Egorov, CEO of Reksoft, shares his observation that the term "marketplace" has expanded to the B2B region, and not just V2S, with a shift in the vector to the platform region, and believes that this trend will continue for the next two to three years. These can be very specific platforms, for example, the management of the spare parts market for railway rolling stock on a federal scale, he says, and adds that it is in this direction that the development of professional IT platforms is now underway. He also notes the rapid growth in the volume of consulting services for the implementation of unique digital solutions, which, in particular, is noticeable at Reksoft. Another trend is product consulting, when from the simple development of a product according to the terms of reference, the focus shifts to building a business idea of ​ ​ the project and "landing" it on innovative technologies and interaction with the client. And the third trend is to build in tandem with the customer full-fledged divisions for the production and support of digital initiatives within the company. Today, fast solutions, parallel, almost conveyor production of several mutually linked solutions are relevant, so it is necessary to rebuild processes and implement tools to help management understand at what stage of their strategic plans the organization is at.

Ventra IT experts note a gradual increase in the complexity of the implemented IT infrastructure, an increase in the number of information services, as a result of which many companies are forced to hastily reorient themselves to a fundamentally different IT architecture. In many cases, the tasks of maintaining and upgrading such systems are solved through outsourcing.

Demand for microservice solutions using popular programming languages, a moderate increase in the need for data analytics and modeling, as well as cybersecurity services, will continue to grow, said Ilya Nabatov, Production Director, T1 Consulting.

From what experts have said, we can draw optimistic conclusions about the state of the Russian IT outsourcing market, as one of the fastest growing sectors of the Russian IT market as a whole. According to experts, it is growing at the same speed as the entire IT market as a whole or even higher. Various areas of IT outsourcing are developing, and new ones are emerging. IT outsourcing is actively moving towards innovations such as predictive service through neural networks and machine learning.

2019-2020

TAdviser data

Changes in the IT outsourcing market

2020 required a rapid technological transformation from various sectors of the market, which naturally generated a new interest in attracting external qualified IT resources. This has helped fill the IT outsourcing market with new volumes of projects. From a familiar and invisible service for business, it has turned into a sustainability factor for many companies.

We have seen this change with our customers, helping them quickly reconfigure IT in the new circumstances. In the spring of 2020, it was a hot time when our service team worked almost around the clock to set up several hundred laptops and transfer them to the client to organize remote work of staff, transfer several thousand bank employees to VDI, etc. The transfer to remote work was rapid, a huge layer of work had to be completed in a matter of days and the customers' own IT teams could not cope with the avalanche of tasks. Therefore, the outsourcing of technical support at that moment became one of the significant conditions for the functioning of the business, - says Andrey Geshel, head of the Service Center "Jet Infosystems."

The pandemic has also had an impact on the IT outsourcing market more broadly, forcing customers to pay attention to other service services. For example, technical support for remote workplaces has become one of the flagship services of this year, although it was usually more in demand by geographically distributed businesses.

Now that remote work has become the new norm, this service is also interesting for companies with localization in one place, adds Andrei Geshel.

Dmitry Kochanov, director of the IT outsourcing department of KORUS Consulting, notes that, despite the active development of insourcing in very large companies, outsourcing services are also in great demand due to flexible pricing, high quality of services, and in general due to increasing competition.

Sergei Solovyov, director of ICL Services, confirms that IT outsourcing services have become even more relevant during the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. The development of this market, he said, is influenced by factors such as the objective need for digital business transformation, a limited number of professional IT specialists in the market, the high cost of maintaining their own IT departments, the lack of internal specialists experience in solving key tasks in the work of the IT infrastructure, etc.

Sergey Sherstobitov, CEO of Angara, believes that now the growth of automation and IT needs is growing much faster than the capabilities of IT departments within organizations.

We are seeing this in our company as well. Our IT department acts as a functional customer of external companies, which allows you to get the necessary result in the predicted time, - he notes.

In addition, Sergey Sherstobitov notes that new, mainly service companies appear on the market, focused on working with large federal customers.

Vladimir Tarasenko, commercial director of Consyst Business Group, is also pushing the outsourcing market to grow.

They are connected in many ways. Companies have goals for full or partial digitalization, but how to achieve these goals - many solve in different ways. Finished products, custom development, low code solutions, etc. Outsourcing is one of the mechanisms for achieving goals. While the trend for product development will continue, outsourcing will have good prospects, - said Vladimir Tarasenko.

Alexander Pestunov, Deputy General Director of Sigma, in addition to the already announced digital transformation, names a number of growth factors in the IT outsourcing market. This, in particular, is the systematic work of the state to create a legislative framework for regulating the IT market and the course towards import substitution. In addition, according to him, external qualified IT resources are necessary for large projects that have already begun and continue government agencies, as well as large companies.

Among the industries where technological modernization will accelerate significantly - housing and communal services (including the consumer segment of power), education and healthcare, as well as transport, construction and finance, - said Alexander Pestunov.

The key areas of IT outsourcing, according to him, remain the services of technical support, implementation, consulting in the field of choosing and developing IT solutions.

Outsourcers are required either an almost universal set of services and competencies (which only very large companies can afford), or a very narrow specialization (for example, taking into account the industry or the specifics of the serviced IT systems and equipment). In any case, the IT outsourcing model proves its viability in the face of another crisis, says an expert at Sigma.

Alexey Parfentiev, head of the analytics department at SearchInform, talks about such a narrow specialization. According to him, the outsourcing market has developed for a long time and has developed in recent years without jumps, evolutionarily. And he would continue such a progressive development if quarantine and mass remoteness did not spur some of his segments.

One of the jumps occurred in our area. Customers began to outsource internal security issues - from protecting insider risks to investigating internal offenses. Until a few years ago, it was believed that this was impossible. Now there is a breakthrough situation. Those who had not previously thought about the problem of protection against internal risks faced her head-on with a massive transfer to a remote location. Outsourcing turned out to be useful, since companies did not have the opportunity to purchase expensive security software and hardware for this process. Therefore, customers reacted vividly to our information security outsourcing, which we launched last year. Plus, some of the customers we provided the service for free, because we decided to support the companies during the pandemic. But now the business continues to cooperate with us on a commercial basis, as the leaders saw the advantages, - explains Alexey Parfentiev.

This example is private, but for outsourcing in general, a favorable time is coming, and the global digital restructuring of 2020 played a major role here, an expert at SearchInform is sure.

Key trends

Open Source Support Services

IT outsourcing reflects the changes and trends that are taking over IT companies. One of the obvious streams for today is Open Source's penetration into big business. While this is not the easiest range of solutions for Enterprise in terms of operation, they are increasingly winning their place in the IT landscapes of enterprises.

There are extremely many SPO products, support requires expertise for each of them. It is expensive to accumulate it at home, so customers willingly transfer support to the SPO outside. Compared to 2019, this business area has increased by 25%, - explains Andrey Geshel, head of the Service Center "Jet Infosystems."

Oleg Kot, First Deputy General Director of SMART Technologies, recalls that Open Source solutions that replace Western vendors' products are a trend created by sanctions pressure.

In this direction, SMART technologies sees serious prospects for itself and intends to develop by creating centers of competence, support and development on Open Source of a very wide range of tasks, "he explains.

Comprehensive outsourcing

A number of experts surveyed by TAdviser believe that customers are now increasingly interested in comprehensive service.

If earlier IT outsourcing was sufficiently segmented by areas, now we are increasingly talking about integrated outsourcing, "says Alexander Makarevich, Deputy Director of the Servionica Service Development and Outsourcing Department.

Vyacheslav Logushev, director of IT service and outsourcing at X-Com, has a similar opinion. According to him, more and more customers want to receive comprehensive service of all IT systems and solutions from one hand, when the contractor takes over not only the service function as such, but also participates in the formation of the customer's IT strategy as an independent consultant.

Common Service Center Services

In the coming years, the structure of the Russian IT outsourcing market will be transformed, experts say. Along with the services of integrated IT outsourcing, the services of an external Common Service Center (CSC) will be in demand, in the west the term Shared Service Center is used, built on the Enterprise Service Management approach (ESM, the evolutionary stage of the ITSM approach development). A number of large Russian companies and state organizations already have their own CSCs, covering almost all supporting back-office business processes and IT services.

International practice shows that thanks to the centralization, unification and automation of processes within the SSC, it is possible to achieve savings in operating costs of up to 15-20%. It must be admitted that at the moment the depth of penetration of SSCs in Russian companies is significantly lagging behind the Western markets, so we see a great potential for growth in this segment, "says Alexander Rozhkov, director of sales at Softline.

Mobile and Web Application Health Services

Separately, it is worth highlighting the flourishing popularity of developing mobile and web applications. Online channels have become a leading way of communicating between business and consumers during the self-isolation regime, they did not lose their significance even after.

For business, the massive use of online channels means reducing the burden on offline and reducing costs. Therefore, this year, services to ensure the operability of platforms of sites and applications are so in demand, - notes Andrey Geshel, head of the Service Center "Jet Infosystems."

Increase the importance of IT outsourcing

The trend of increasing the importance of IT outsourcing is also noticeable. It is being transformed into a business continuity factor.

This is manifested in the fact that customers transfer to us more and more responsibility for the operation of certain IT services. So customers reduce costs by focusing the task in one hand, and at the same time - achieve a stricter SLA for themselves. And customers are increasingly thinking about business goals, demanding not the availability of individual IT services, but the functioning of entire business processes. When an outsourcer not only replaces an internal IT team, but becomes a business partner, this gives real advantages - the ability to focus on his main business and making a profit, "says Andrey Geschel.

Customer demand growth

The market is undergoing transformations associated with changes in many product and service models. Growing competition is driving the market, but at the same time highlighting new requirements for the quality and speed of services that not all players will be able to provide.

Outsourcing, like consulting, are traditionally difficult markets that conceal large reputational risks and requirements for players. Therefore, of course, the market will develop, but at the same time customers will be even more demanding, and standards will change towards higher quality and speed, alas, for less money, - said Vladimir Tarasenko, commercial director of Consyst Business Group.

Other trends

Dmitry Kochanov, director of the IT outsourcing department at Korus Consulting, lists some industry trends. So, according to him, the demand for outsourcing of IT services management has increased in retail, since many companies began to grow much faster than they planned at the beginning of the year, and they need to establish internal processes and control changes when scaling the business. The pharmaceutical industry now pays a lot of attention to information security issues, and logistics companies are building darkstors and creating an IT infrastructure for them.

In general, we recorded a tangible jump in demand for technical support services, since the massive transition to remote work, the increased load on channels and a number of other factors exposed the weak points of the company's infrastructure, as well as the unprepared of many users for new working conditions, - says Dmitry Kochanov.

Sergei Solovyov, director of ICL Services, believes that in 2020 there is a continuing demand among customers for IT services such as outsourcing, and IT infrastructures ON cloud computing others. The pandemic, according to him, also contributed to an increase in demand for services for organizing remote jobs virtualizations , jobs, IT audit and consulting.

Vladimir Leonov, Technical Director of AMT Group, among the trends includes the complication of the developed applied information systems (IS) taking into account their integration with the customer's business processes, as well as service support for these systems together with the systems with which they are integrated. In addition, according to the expert, often customers require full outsourcing of IP technical support services, from the first line of support to refinement and modernization.

Igor Nikulin, Deputy General Director for Business Development, Director of the Sales and Project Management Department of the CROC IT company, notes that most often customers outsource software development and support, Service and Helpdesk. In addition, outsourcing of workplace services (AWS) has recently been in great demand. Here, he said, we can talk about both support for standard workplaces and virtual (VDI).

Largest IT Outsourcers

At the end of 2019, Lanit became the leader of the Russian market in the field of IT outsourcing, outsourcing contracts brought it more than 20 billion rubles. The top 5 leaders of this market also included I-Teco, Jet Infosystems, Digital Economy League and CROC.

The full version of the rating is available in the article The largest IT outsourcers in Russia > > >.

2018-2019

12th in the world in terms of freelance programmers

The leader of IT outsourcing for 2019 is traditionally India, where there are many cheap programmers (even if most of them graduated from two-week courses).

But at this time, India is being squeezed by new players, such as Bangladesh, which has become, thanks to the accessible Internet in cities and a large number of qualified specialists, already the second most freelance employees in the world, it accounts for 16% of their total. According to this indicator, Bangladesh is still inferior to India (24%), but ahead of the United States (12%).

]]

Russia ranks 12th in this market with a share of about 1%. This is stated in a study by the Oxford Institute. Internet

TAdviser data

The state of the Russian IT outsourcing market

The Russian IT outsourcing market shows stable growth. Such indicators, in particular, are influenced by several factors. These are various legislative initiatives and changes in the regulation of the IT services, finance and construction market, which expand the demand for custom improvements and support services. In addition, large transformation and digital innovation projects require external skilled resources.

At the end of 2018, the IT outsourcing market stepped forward significantly. Domestic business has achieved an understanding that in an unstable economy, it is necessary to create the strongest corporate IT infrastructure, giving all auxiliary processes outside. In 2019, this trend continues, as more and more companies realize that competently implemented IT products today are a necessary and competitive advantage. IT contractors are getting deeper into the business of their customers and not only supplying IT tools, but also helping to operate them. Companies feel the need for extensive, comprehensive IT services at the highest level. Contacting the IT contractor does not require personnel training and long-term training. The problem with the dismissal of own employees is also reduced, since IT outsourcers have knowledge distributed to more people. Thus, the advantages of outsourcing and the prospects for its development are becoming more and more clear for customers every day, "said Alexander Niznik, CEO of Novardis.

NVision Group believes that the IT outsourcing market in 2018 showed steady growth primarily due to the entry of Russian companies into the market, which decided to withdraw some divisions from the state. The main reason for such decisions is not only the desire to get rid of non-core activities, in which a significant number of personnel are involved, but also the need to improve the quality of services, without increasing the cost. According to NVision Group experts, the transition of most IT costs from CAPEX to OPEX, as well as a change in the supply structure from vendors, has a significant impact on the market - the share of equipment outsourcing contracts and the share of cloud services are increasing.

The IT outsourcing market is growing steadily if you rely on the cash equivalent. Additional services and services appear, and in some industries - also new customers who need outsourcing. It can be predicted that the dynamics of 2018 will continue in 2019. The development of the market continues to stimulate the policy of import substitution. At the same time, the demand for the service model, outsourcing of turnkey business processes is growing. In addition, the classic approach remains relevant, especially in the banking sector and retail, - said Yulia Ilyushenkova, director of business development a1qa (Quality Technologies company).

BSS also announces market growth in 2019.

We believe, based on the results of the first half of the year, that growth will continue in the second half of 2019, but will not significantly exceed the indicators of the previous year, "says Elena Zakharova, director of Digital2Go at BSS.

Oleg Aerov, head of Accenture's Industrial Solutions and Outsourcing practice in Russia and Kazakhstan, identifies three growth points. Firstly, it is a large number of large transformation projects that require external resources both for the implementation and for the further operation of the existing landscape of systems in order to free up the IT resources of customers. Secondly, the use of a wide range of digital innovations. The third growth factor, according to Accenture expert, is the growing demand for custom development and development of systems - customers are no longer always content with standard solutions from suppliers.

Georgy Megrelishvili, Director of the Service Development and Outsourcing Department of Servionica (I-Teco Group of Companies) notes that comprehensive projects are in demand on the principle of "one window," when the outsourcer undertakes not only the fulfillment of the task set by the client, but also the development of a service strategy, taking into account the long-term goals of the client.

{{quote "This model of cooperation allows you to strengthen the traditional advantages of outsourcing: reducing costs for non-core tasks, flexible IT resource management, supporting business changes related to access to other regions and new markets," he says. }}

At the same time, factors that put pressure on the IT outsourcing market in Russia should be taken into account. Dmitry Parshin, director of the development center of Artezio (part of the Lanit group) lists some of them:

• increasing competition among medium and small companies, forcing many of them to look for non-standard ways to conduct and develop business;
• inability and unwillingness to pay for quality IT services, mostly by small and medium-sized businesses;
• Business unwillingness to invest in developing innovative solutions and technologies that enable them to benefit from the market
• the transition of large companies from an IT services outsourcing model to the formation of their own high-quality IT divisions;
• significant financial, resource and time costs for innovative IT solutions in the field of BigData and AI (artificial intelligence) with a non-guaranteed result;
• unwillingness of most outsourcing companies to invest in the development of expertise and experience in the field of BigData\AI.

As a result, in his opinion, an interesting situation is developing when "traditional" outsourcing companies do not have the opportunity to enter the high-tech market for BigData\AI solutions due to high cost, and large companies bring their IT divisions, hardened and trained to develop products for themselves, to the outsource market. It is these "pocket" IT divisions of large companies that will soon provide significant competition to "traditional" outsourcing companies in Russia in the field of profitable innovative outsiders.

In this situation, the Artezio expert believes, the competition will be able to withstand those "traditional" IT companies that will work for both domestic Russian and international markets, as well as invest in obtaining expertise and experience in modern technologies (BiData\AI).

An unconditional advantage will be given by the creation of a "boxed" product based on AI for medium and small businesses and increasing their efficiency. Another area of ​ ​ development of outsourcing services is working with the sector of industrial enterprises that need to optimize technical processes, implement AI and the results of BigData analysis in their production cycle, Dmitry Parshin believes.

Georgy Megrelishvili, Director of the Service Development and Outsourcing Department of Servionica (I-Teco Group of Companies), highlights several other restraining factors: technological diversity, lack of resources for development of SMB companies, incomplete or outdated industry standards, as well as a shortage of qualified IT specialists, especially in the regions.

{{quote 'According to the HSE, only 15% of more than 25,000 IT graduates are fully prepared for real work tasks. It takes 6-12 months to adapt a new employee: an employer's investment in only one newcomer can be expressed by the formula (PHY + taxes + administrative expenses) x 12. Therefore, even if the customer's goal is to create his own strong IT team, cooperation with the outsourcer will be useful, since this is quick access to ready-made competencies and project experience, the expert says. }}

Revenue of Russian companies from IT outsourcing services

According to the results of 2018, Lanit is the leader among Russian companies providing IT outsourcing services. The top five also included Jet Infosystems, I-Teco, CROC and the Russian representative office of Itransition - Itranzishn RUS.

The full version of the rating is available in the article The largest IT outsourcers in Russia > > >.

Trends in the Russian IT outsourcing market

Main article: Trends in the IT market in Russia

Demand for outsourcing of workplace services

Among the outsourcing services that are increasingly popular, it is worth noting the support of automated workplaces (AWS). For large customers, this is a routine with a huge number of small operations, which requires a large staff of novice IT specialists. They need to be trained, motivated, paid salaries and taxes, rented premises and bear other costs. Therefore, almost all large customers are ready to give this function to the outsourcer.

We have a growing number of such projects where we support AWS both in Moscow and the Moscow Region, and for distributed companies throughout the country, including the most remote settlements. So, at the moment we have all the jobs of Post Bank users in 1600 cities and settlements of Russia. The quality of user service for such a complex project is record high, SLA is more than 98%, - says Andrey Geshel, Director of the Service Center of Jet Infosystems.

The NVision Group notes that the volume of contests for outsourcing job services breaks all records, but due to high competition and the release of new players with insufficient experience, many performers suffered losses.

We expect further growth in demand in this segment. At the same time, for the most part, large Russian companies are not yet ready to abandon the desire to control key business applications, they say in NVision.

Strengthening of insourcing positions

A trend continues to develop in the domestic IT outsourcing market, in which some large customers try to form their own resource centers by recruiting a team to themselves or attracting specific performers to the team. For these customers, autosourcing, in fact, moved to inhouse. As a result, such IT insourcing structures often get large projects.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of such teams often leaves much to be desired, and we see a number of examples of projects when the result did not meet expectations, - notes Konstantin Kolotov, commercial director of Consyst Business Group

Increase in the share of remote specialists

One cannot fail to note the confidently growing share of specialists working remotely both for end customers and in the staff of outsourcing companies. This leads to leveling the value of the location of specialists and the influx of specialists from remote places with traditionally underdeveloped IT specialization into the labor market.

On the one hand, this gives a chance to potential high-class IT specialists from the hinterland to develop and receive a decent salary, increasing the economy of their region, on the other hand, in the coming years such an influx of personnel can significantly affect the balance of labor resources in traditional IT regions, - says Dmitry Parshin, director of the development center of Artezio (part of the Lanit group).

In his opinion, this can lead both to a decrease in the overheating of the IT specialists market and a decrease in the level of their salaries, and to an increase in the shortage of IT specialists due to their massive transition to remote work.

Andrei Geshel, adds that the increasing competition for human resources in large cities of Russia forces companies to open a CSC (Common Service Center) with a significant IT function in the regions. However, this venture is not without difficulties: the selection of qualified personnel, building processes, managing a remote team - all this requires competencies, time and additional costs.

To avoid complications and unnecessary costs of forming their own regional IT service, many have already begun to choose an alternative option - a combination of CSR with outsourcing IT functions, in which the role of CSR boils down to receiving and dispatching applications from users to the provider.

We are also leveraging the potential of the regions. For example, in 2018, a large branch of the Jet Infosystems Service Center was opened in Samara, thanks to which we managed to significantly optimize the recruitment process and our own costs, - said Andrey Geshel.

Austaffing relevance

Classic outsourcing is increasingly in demand, particularly fixed price outsourcing, according to a number of experts. Most companies, especially those whose business is closely connected with IT, try to form and develop their own expertise on key IT systems and technologies, and purchase the missing IT services through resource and outstaffing models.

The task of contractors is to provide support with human resources. For the QA-sphere (Quality Assurance - quality assurance - approx. TAdviser), the outstaffing model is especially relevant as part of the change management process, "says Yulia Ilyushenkova, director of business development a1qa.

At the same time, Alla Prokhorova, General Director of Aplana Software (Aplana Group of Companies), believes that outstaffing adds problems to IT service providers, because work on this model is more difficult than on the project.

Apply digital innovation to system support and operation

Some experts attribute the application of the full range of digital innovations to the support and operation of systems to key market trends. These are, in particular, proactive and predictive monitoring, artificial intelligence and chatbots, automatic testing, etc.

Proactive and predictive monitoring - allows you to prevent violations of services (in extreme cases, respond to them faster), reduce the volume of routine operations and labor costs for them. Artificial intelligence, chatbots and automation of services - significantly reduce the processing time of requests, make it possible to solve some of them automatically and reduce the number of critical incidents. Automatic testing (both part of the CI/CD or DevOps independent) - allows you to significantly reduce the release cycle and get rid of routine operations, - explains Oleg Aerov, head of the Industrial Solutions and Outsourcing practice Accenture in Russia and Kazakhstan.

As a result, when calculating a business case, the benefit of applying the above innovations already exceeds the benefit of the difference in remuneration when switching to outsourcing using low cost locations.

Other trends

Oleg Aerov, head of Accenture's Industrial Solutions and Outsourcing practice in Russia and Kazakhstan, notes several more trends. In particular, these are:

• Customer expectations to receive fast, flexible service, with the most simplified contracting model. In proportion, Accenture sees fewer and fewer classic outsourcing deals.
• Increase in the share of consulting in outsourcing compared to traditional operation.
• Growing demand for application development and development services.
• The active development and use of Agile and DevOps leads to the fact that some of the system support and development specialists are simultaneously part of the micro-service and DevOps teams of customers.

Lilia Aleeva, Head of Marketing at ICL Services, talks about three more trends:

First, more and more services will be provided through the cloud. Secondly, the increasing volumes of new technologies: the development of "smart cities," the development of the AI direction,, IoT, RPA\ ARVR the need to ensure information security - all this requires large resources and competencies, this can encourage businesses to switch from independent attempts to develop these services to outsourcing them. Third, customers remain interested in reducing the cost of maintaining their own IT infrastructure, software development, and services. DPC

Pavel Shmelev, Director of the RDTECH Center for Technical Consulting, believes that the main trends that continue to play an important role in the IT market are improving the quality and flexibility of service delivery in the constantly increasing world of IT processes and solutions.

The use of external outsourcers, objectively having greater competence and experience in solving issues of supporting a particular business process or software product, allows not only to save money on supporting the IT infrastructure, but also to focus its own IT resources on the main business tasks. In the context of digital business transformation, the use of the advantages of outsourcing can reduce financial risks, as well as get away from the dictates of a particular vendor or binding to a particular stack of technological solutions. In the context of foreign policy turbulence, it is important to hedge risks by using external resources to perform specific technological tasks, without putting all the eggs in one basket, - said the representative of the RDTECH.

According to Konstantin Kolotova, Commercial Director of Consyst Business Group, the main trends in the IT outsourcing market are also the need to take into account a large number of parameters, the increasing role of consulting in the design of IT solutions and digital platforms, and the increasing requirements for teams, speed and effectiveness of projects.

It also increases the requirement for ready-made solutions and successfully tested platforms at the entrance to the project, the requirement to increase the flexibility of solutions, flexibility in organizing projects. In addition, he notes the constant interaction of a large number of different market participants and teams within the framework of one project.

Elena Zakharova, Director of Digital2Go at BSS, talks about the formation of a tendency to improve the quality of IT products (code review, refactorig, etc.). Also, due to the scaling of ready-made solutions to an extensive client base, BSS is seeing an increase in demand for load testing of products and systems for technical and business monitoring of high-load solutions in industrial operation.

Business Development Director a1qa Yulia Ilyushenkova notes that when introducing new IT systems as part of business critical initiatives, a service model is used (turnkey QA services, QA consulting). It is also in demand when the customer needs a narrow examination (load testing, CI/CD implementation, integration of testing into DevOps).

Georgy Megrelishvili, Director of the Service Development and Outsourcing Department of Servionica, speaks of the growing value of the consulting component of outsourcing projects.

{{quote 'But this is not only about the fact that the experience of cooperation with different companies and industries that the outsourcer accumulates can be replicated. It can be additionally capitalized by creating products and services for the most popular customer tasks. For example, a standard hardware and IT infrastructure support outsourcing service can be supplemented by the provision of a cloud IoT service. The customer can organize monitoring of equipment and processes without introducing additional IT solutions and purchasing servers - everything is deployed in the provider's cloud, the expert explains. }}

A number of experts talk about industry trends. So, according to NVision Group specialists, in telecom and retail, one can observe a tendency to completely outsource the operation of the network. Companies with state participation are more likely to use cloud services and virtual infrastructure deployed on Russian sites (in connection with a number of legislative initiatives restricting the use of foreign servers). And among the representative offices of Western companies with established and formalized IT processes, the NVision Group notes the outsourcing of all infrastructure services, which are often divided into several lots, in order to attract the most competent partners at a minimum price.

Alexander Feinboim, head of IT outsourcing at CROC, is recording an increasing confidence of industrial organizations in IT service providers. Such companies, he said, have begun to outsource some of their services more often. In particular, some metallurgical and cosmetic companies already have such contracts, the representative of CROC notes.

2016-2017

TAdviser data

The state of the Russian IT outsourcing market

According to TAdviser, at the end of 2016, the Russian IT outsourcing market grew by 16% and reached 88.4 billion rubles. Stable growth is ensured by both the development of information technology in the country and the economic situation in which Russian enterprises are located. Outsourcing is already entering a stage of technological and psychological maturity: customers are ready to give part of the systems or IT infrastructure outside, and suppliers have the technological resources to ensure the necessary level of availability and security of systems.

Georgy Megrelishvili, Director of the Servionica Service and Outsourcing Development Department (I-Teco Group of Companies), notes that the double-digit pace of development of the Russian IT outsourcing market is due to both the desire of customers to optimize IT costs and the development of competencies of outsourcing service providers and the spread of a comprehensive service model.

At the end of 2017, TAdviser predicts a similar positive trend at the level of 15-16%.

Valery Sokolyuk, technical director of Asteros, believes that the market unambiguously retains positive dynamics. According to his company, in 2017, growth will remain at the level of 10-15%, as last year.

The economic situation also contributes to an increase in interest. Against the background of market instability, the desire to reduce costs is pushing more and more enterprises of medium and large businesses to serious estimates of the IT outsourcing model. And new IT management tools are becoming part of strategic business maps. An additional factor in the growth of the market is the development of the data transmission and storage infrastructure, as well as the industry specialization of individual outsourcers who can offer solutions for specific industrial tasks.

If we talk about the maturity of the relationship, then they have also become more understandable and transparent - working in SLA conditions becomes a practice for many, and the presence of understandable and digitizable KPIs makes the process of moving to work according to the outsourcing model quite painless, - adds Valery Sokolyuk.

According to Dmitry Kochanov, director of the IT outsourcing department of Korus Consulting Group of Companies, in 2017 the IT outsourcing market in Russia showed unconditional growth.

Confidence and trust from those customers who already have a positive experience in outsourcing part of the tasks affects. For large clients of Korus Consulting, the benefits of attracting an external contractor are becoming more and more obvious. Firstly, this is a professional approach, secondly, a guarantee of cost transparency and, of course, a consistently high SLA level. For our comprehensive projects on technical support of IT infrastructure, this figure, in principle, is not lower than 98%, "he said.

Oleg Suvorov, Development Director of NVBS, also believes that in 2017 the IT outsourcing market showed growth in relation to 2015-2016. years.

Of course, this is due to the exit of the Russian economy from the recession. If in 2015-2016 IT outsourcing was only a means of instantly achieving savings, then in 2017-2018. customers purchased and will prefer to purchase outsourcing services, focusing on both the price factor and the quality of services, as well as additional services for business development (modernization of IT infrastructure, material and technical base, increasing the flexibility of IT services for business, the introduction of new IT processes), - he believes.

In addition to the economic factor, the informatization of business is growing every year, the degree of integration of IT services into the implementation of the main product of Customers, accordingly, IT budgets are growing. It is the growth of business informatization in Russian companies with the stabilization of the country's economy that is the driver of the growth of the IT outsourcing market: new services, technologies, processes are being introduced. The simplest example of this is self-service cash desks in retail, electronic queues in banks, services for storing data of the population in the telecom industry. All these solutions are becoming more and more popular every day, it is difficult to imagine their implementation and operation nationwide without IT outsourcing services, adds Oleg Suvorov.

Dmitry Ivitsky, director of the IBS SAP Support Center, also speaks about the growth of the market. According to him, over the past years, the outsourcing market has shown stable growth at a level significantly higher than the growth of IT services. He also notes that the development of the market is influenced by both a general increase in the level of maturity of domestic business and a high level of instability in many industries, which leads to the need to give all auxiliary processes as much as possible outside.

Mikhail Aronson, Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Maykor, says that the IT outsourcing segment is traditionally considered one of the most stable and promising areas of the IT services market. At the same time, despite the fact that the business is still in no hurry to invest in projects to update the IT infrastructure, the demand for IT outsourcing services shows positive dynamics.

First of all, this is due to the fact that today any organization faces a strategic goal - to increase business efficiency and reduce costs. In this case, IT outsourcing serves as an effective tool for achieving this goal, since it allows companies to optimize IT costs by transferring non-core functions to a service partner, explains Mikhail Aronson.

According to Daniil Kutepkin, head of the service center of the company LANIT-Integration"" (part of the "" group), LANIT a further increase in demand for service services, on the one hand, and an increase in competition among players, on the other hand, in the coming years will provide the domestic IT outsourcing market with stable growth.

According to Yuri Panchenko, Deputy Director of the Service Center for the Organization of Production of Jet Infosystems, the market is growing steadily, and taking into account the state rate of digitalization of the economy, the growth rate will only increase.

ICL Services lists eight main market drivers:

• Law on Import Substitution of Software
• Growing Demand for Technology Platforms - Private Cloud Development, Solution Mobility
• Banking, Oil & Gas and Telecommunications Need Big Data Analysis - Developing and Implementing BI Solutions
• Investments in infrastructure upgrades and new IT technologies such as data center design/upgrades and development, contact and call centers, unified IT enterprise systems
• Data Migration and Hosting Demand under the Data Protection Act - Solutions to Keep Security High in the Company
• Demand for further system integration and consulting services around cloud architecture and design
• Adoption of business applications, such as, CRM,, as well HRM SCM as - ERP systems, in retail, to trade banks and telecommunications; industriryrelated solutions.
• High interest in optimizing the efficiency of IT systems in all industries - developing competencies in system integration, business and IT consulting, supporting the quality of IT services

Mikhail Golovachev, Deputy General Director of Amtel-Service, believes that the IT outsourcing market shows restrained growth comparable to inflation. He calls the main deterrent to the economy regime, which now acts not so much as the main driver for the transition to the outsourcing model, as it was a few years ago, as a motive to reduce the cost of IT support, to abandon some of the services.

This trend is observed, for example, in the segment of support for computer and print infrastructure. At the same time, it should be noted that the market is growing in the segments of the engineering infrastructure service, including video surveillance and access control systems, complex projects to support IT and engineering infrastructure, including data center infrastructure, an increase in the number of information security outsourcing projects, he says.

Dmitry Vedev, Marketing Director of the iT Group of Companies, recalls that for a number of reasons, the open IT outsourcing market in our country occupies a much more modest place than in developed markets.

This does not mean that outsourcing does not apply - just most large Russian companies and banks have chosen for themselves the way to form their own "internal" IT outsourcing companies. There are many reasons for this. The desire of owners and management to maintain control over finances, poor process manageability, a general lack of trust in contractors, lack of capitalization and "small size" of IT companies themselves in Russia in order to balance the customer's IT infrastructure and IT personnel. As a result, it is the affiliated players who become the largest IT companies in our country in terms of the number of personnel, he notes.

At the same time, revenue from the largest insourcers has grown much faster than the IT services market, which indicates the further distribution of this model among large companies in Russia, adds Alexey Ananyin, president of the Borlas group.

This has obviously held back and held back the development of outsourcing in its classical sense. On the other hand, the cloud model is, in fact, the development of IT outsourcing ideas in a new format. In this sense, the boundaries between the existing outsourcing segment and the cloud services market will blur more and more, he said.

Revenue of Russian companies from IT outsourcing services

The full rating of companies by revenue from IT outsourcing services is available in the article The largest IT outsourcers in Russia > > >.

Trends in the Russian IT outsourcing market

The main trends in the Russian IT outsourcing market are the growth of demand for complex services and complex services. Experts interviewed by TAdviser most often talk about these trends.

Higher Level Services

The growth in demand for complex and technologically capacious tasks is characteristic not only for the Russian market. This trend is global.

Outsourcers will increasingly be involved in consulting services, as projects of increased complexity, as a rule, require detailed study and understanding of customers' business, "says Valery Sokolyuk, technical director of Asteros.

As an example of complex tasks, he cites the migration of critical information systems and industry solutions to cloud environments while maintaining the health and continuity of business processes throughout the project.

Sergey Korneev, President of the Technoserv Group of IT Companies, also sees that the structure of service contracts is intensively shifting from technical support services, when Technoserv's obligations as an executor are limited to work to restore the operability of the customer's equipment - to higher-level service services, when the service provider provides the actual operability of the equipment, information systems or business services. In the first case, according to him, the company sells its technical expertise, and in the second - already expert knowledge in certain business areas of customers. "And there are more and more such areas," he concludes.

Comprehensive services

Given the growth in trust and understanding of the effectiveness of the outsourcing model, customers have a desire to transfer more comprehensive services to an external provider. Responding to such market needs, suppliers expand their competencies and focus on the development of complex services and service platforms.

For example, contact centers are increasingly providing services in the format of General Service Centers: not only call processing, telemarketing and other types of communications are outsourced, but also support document management, HR processes, logistics and other business processes, "says Georgy Megrelishvili, Director of the Service Development and Outsourcing Department "Servionica "(GC" I-Teco ").

Mikhail Aronson, Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Maykor, notes the demand for projects for comprehensive support for IT and industry infrastructure and business application management.

An integrated approach to outsourcing, when the customer receives all the necessary IT support services nationwide from two to three, and sometimes from a single supplier, becomes an established practice, he says.

Single Service Contracts

Among the trends in the IT outsourcing market, the desire of customers already using outsourcing to conclude single service contracts clearly looms. This model implies that the company interacts with one service provider, which, in turn, is responsible for providing the necessary services and the work of all contractors. At the same time, this approach allows companies to focus on their business tasks, reduce the cost of interacting with many contractors, changing the methodology for solving IT problems to a "single window" format.

However, the decision to conclude a single service contract requires a certain maturity on the part of customers, so so far, mainly, enterprise-level companies demonstrate their readiness to switch to such an interaction model, "notes Dmitry Kochanov, director of the IT outsourcing department of Korus Consulting Group of Companies.

Value of service cost and quality

The customer's desire to save his money is always there, since this is the guarantee of his own success and competitiveness in the market where he carries out his activities. Therefore, factors such as cost and quality of service are important for the customer.

After all, the customer's requirements for the service provider are actually a reflection of the requirements of the market where the customer operates. The more competition in the customer's market, the more significant factors of quality and cost, because outsourcing helps to reduce internal costs that somehow affect the final cost of the customer's products and services. The balance of requirements between these factors strongly depends on the specifics of the customer's business. I will explain using the example of a service for supporting workplaces and printing. For retail or for medical institutions, the cost of services is more important than quality. These customers have a large territorial network, many jobs (AWS), and the cost of the service directly depends on the number. At the same time, the refusal of one workplace or poor-quality printing is not so critical for business. In the case of, for example, oil companies (for management companies) or government agencies for these services, quality is a priority. If, in general, the more critical IT services are for business, and the greater the "price of loss" of their refusal, the more significant the quality, not the price of the service, "says Sergey Korneev, President of the Technoserv IT Group.

Change the outsourcing business model

Another trend is associated with a change in the operating model of outsourcing companies. More and more companies are betting on the "uberization" of their management model, which in the era of globalization and informatization makes such a model not only possible, but also effective for those types of outsourcing services where it is possible to attract large volumes of homogeneous resources.

Technoserv is watching these processes with interest, despite the fact that our outsourcing market is mostly located in the zone of high-tech and specialized services for the needs of the customer, and this model is poorly implemented in this premium segment, - notes Sergey Korneev.

Cloud Services - Primary Driver

The range of outsourcing services is constantly developing, capturing related areas. Audit, optimization of business processes and systems, cloud services - all this is becoming even more in demand. At the same time, according to experts, it is cloud services - the provision of IT infrastructure, platforms and software as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) - that will be the main driver.

These services already play a significant role in large organizations, allowing companies to reach a qualitatively different level of management, communications and use of their computing power. IT solutions as a service will provide access to information technology not previously used by small and medium-sized businesses due to the high cost of implementation and ownership of IT infrastructure. In many ways, this will be decisive in the competition and struggle for efficiency, - notes Daniil Kutepkin, head of the service center of Lanit-Integration (part of the Lanit group).

Ilya Stechkin, Marketing Director of Atlex, attributes the development of the'anything as a service' model (XaaS) to market trends.

More precisely, we see interest in Bare-Metal Infrastructure Managed Services, Cloud Infrastructure Managed Services, Platform Managed Services and, of course, containers as a service, he says.

Turnkey Service

Another important trend is the development of such a service as a turnkey service on the Russian market. The advantages of this model for customers are obvious: such a format of cooperation actually saves the customer from capital costs for the purchase of equipment, consumables, equipment support, etc.

At the moment, Maykor is working on the development of such services, for example, our customers already have access to a printing service, as well as an automated workplace service, "says Mikhail Aronson.

Other trends

IBS calls the trend an increase in the share of long-term contracts:

If 5 years ago, the bulk of contracts were for 1 year, now there are 2, 3 and even 5-year contracts, this is already the norm.

Another trend that IBS believes has become a standard in the market is the principle of dividing IT functions between insourcing and outsourcing. It consists in the fact that the compact IT division forms and controls the overall IT architecture, identifies business needs and manages the strategy for the development of IT systems, and typical routine functions such as support, administration, programming, etc., are outsourced .

2015-2016

TAdviser data

The state of the Russian IT outsourcing market

IT outsourcing is the most sustainable segment of the IT services market. His condition is largely determined by general trends in the IT industry. The growth of informatization, the use of innovative solutions and a service model, the transition to a cloud infrastructure and import substitution - greatly increase the efficiency of IT and reduce the costs of companies.

According to the results of 2015, TAdviser recorded the growth of the Russian IT outsourcing market by 15%, the market volume reached 76.2 billion rubles. At the end of 2016 and in 2017, a similar trend is expected.

The IT outsourcing segment can be called one of the most promising areas for the IT market in a crisis. The unstable economic situation in the country forces companies to optimize budgets for IT development and concentrate on support.

Mikhail Alekseev, CEO of CRT Service (part of Maykor), speaking about the sustainability of the IT outsourcing market, adds that this is due to the continuing unstable economic situation, which obliges most Russian companies to increase operational efficiency and abandon infrastructure projects.

This suggests that the outsourcing segment will be in a small plus at the end of the year, - notes Alekseev.

Dmitry Kochanov, director of the IT outsourcing department of Korus Consulting Group of Companies, believes that IT outsourcing is one of the foundations for optimizing the costs of operating and maintaining basic services. However, the transition to this model requires readiness and sufficient maturity in processes from the customer, as well as a high culture from the performer.

For example, we at Korus Consulting focus primarily on the client's business tasks, without starting from the systems already available in the company. This is what allows you to find the most effective solutions within the budget, "says Kochanov. - Compared to Western countries, the share of outsourcing in Russia is certainly small. We are still in a catch-up position. At the same time, the main consumers of IT services in our country are, as before, financial companies, the public sector and retail

Lev Nikolau, head of Atriniti, Asteros Group, calls IT outsourcing one of the most promising areas for the crisis IT market.

Our outsourcing market is very young and immature. However, it can be assumed that in some cases, in the context of an economic downturn, the demand for IT outsourcing will only grow. This is due to the fact that companies are increasingly faced with questions about reducing the cost of owning IT infrastructure. However, the direction of IT outsourcing, like the entire IT market, is developing under the slogan: "More services for less money." Of course, the situation that has arisen puts IT outsourcing companies before the choice: either to cut financial appetites and maintain a reputation as an effective IT outsourcer, or to remain on the sidelines of history. Everyone has to work on efficiency, which spurs the competitiveness of leading players with large contracts, says Lev Nikolau. - Our company has long developed a formula for success for outsourcing projects: uniform standards of service support efficiency for all customers and strict criteria for assessing the quality of services. It is this approach that allows us, in the current situation, to receive large and long-term service contracts.

ICL Services believes that the constant desire to agree on the maximum reduction in the cost of IT projects in Russia leads to a decrease in the profitability of IT companies, and also significantly affects the quality of the services provided.

Alexander Fainboim, head of IT outsourcing at CROC, notes that despite the fact that the Russian IT outsourcing wound is relatively young, he was able to quickly win good positions. Gartner analysts predict that such active growth will continue until 2018.

Today, more than 60% of companies somehow use IT outsourcing services. Initially, external specialists were given exclusively technical tasks, but now the tendency to shift focus to more complex and complex tasks, including support, consulting and much more, is very strong. Retail, industry and, surprisingly, government organizations resort most actively to IT outsourcing services, "says Alexander Feinboim.

Yuri Panchenko, Deputy Director of the Service Center for the Organization of Production of Jet Infosystems, looking at the new and additional contracts of his division, sees that the need for IT outsourcing has become higher, and claims that in the coming years it will only grow.

For our part, we are preparing for this: we are recruiting new specialists, constantly conducting trainings for our engineers, - explains Panchenko.

According to him, 2016 was marked by exponential growth of the IT outsourcing market. Moreover, according to him, the structure of demand is also changing - customers are increasingly interested in higher-level services: infrastructure cloud services, ensuring the availability of the application part, increasing the maturity of IT processes, etc.

Roman Pavlov, chairman of the board of directors of Sirius, agrees with a colleague from Jet Infosystems, saying that the technical support and IT outsourcing market can only grow next year.

Pavlov connects this primarily with the end of the warranty terms for servicing existing equipment, which will require the conclusion of additional service contracts. In addition, reducing IT budgets and their desire to reduce costs as much as possible leads to the need for high-quality technical support for already operated systems, he said.

The task of the IT company in this case is not to offer a replacement of equipment, but to update and configure existing software, which will allow the customer to optimize previously purchased resources and avoid additional investments, the expert says.

According to Vladimir Turlachev, head of the technical support and IT outsourcing group of Softline, every next year, living in conditions of difficulties in the Russian economy, makes this market more and more mature - both from the performers and from the customers. The language of communication has now developed a single one - the language of business, money and SLA. And for the most part, the level of relations under contracts corresponds to Western, the representative of Softline believes.

Trends in the Russian IT outsourcing market

Experts of the Russian IT outsourcing market in the course of the TAdviser survey called the current and promising trends of recent times.

For example, Mikhail Alekseev, CEO of CRT Service (part of Maykor), has seen a significant increase in the number of long-term IT outsourcing contracts in almost all industries. Plus, almost all of them are complex in nature - they combine the support of the entire IT and industry infrastructure.

According to this scheme, Maykor works with Alfa-Bank, Raiffeisen Bank, MegaFon Retail, Svyaznoy and others, - explains Alekseev.

Another important trend, in his opinion, is the desire of customers to find outsourcing models that allow attracting the contractor to the tasks of increasing profitability - the so-called gain sharing.

Maykor works on such a model with Rostelecom as part of the Rural Communications project. The essence of the model is that the remuneration for outsourcing services depends on the income of the telecom operator in a particular territory. This stimulates service providers to search for sources of increasing customer profitability - by providing additional services to the population.

Yuri Panchenko from Jet Infosystems also calls the desire for integrated IT outsourcing one of the most promising trends.

According to him, among the customers of Jet Infosystems there are those who are intensively getting rid of non-core IT assets for them and focusing on their own business. Moreover, we are not talking about SMB, but about Large Enterprise companies. In this paradigm, CIO becomes an IT business partner in its organization, and the provider provides any IT services on a one-stop shop basis.

I think that in the next 4-5 years the market will actively develop in this direction, "says Panchenko.

At the same time, he calls flexibility the main trend. If earlier services were built according to the "proyekt‒zakupka‒sozdaniye‒testirovaniye‒ekspluatatsiya" scheme, then modern conditions allow you to exclude stages 2‒3, and sometimes even 1-4 due to adaptive cloud environments.

This helps to speed up implementation at times, and the ability to try on IT services quickly and economically to increase the efficiency of the main business gives almost unlimited competitive advantages, "Panchenko said.

Lev Nikolau, head of Atriniti, calls the full outsourcing of management of the IT infrastructure of clients from small and medium-sized businesses and startups a new trend for Russia. At the same time, according to him, large organizations with a high level of IT consumption: retail, oil and gas, banks still remain the main consumers of outsourcing services .

Basically, they delegate contractors to perform routine IT tasks, such as IT infrastructure maintenance, Service Desk, application support, contact centers. Attracting IT consultants will require a rather narrow examination of the public sector and industrial production: the driver for the demand for outsourcing will be the active digitalization of these areas, - said the head of Atriniti.

Vladimir Turlachev from Softline believes that the obvious trends of this market are clouds and a regional-distributed service for servicing infrastructure on the ground.

Dmitry Kochanov, Director of the IT Outsourcing Department of Korus Consulting Group of Companies, in addition to trends common to the IT market, such as the growth of informatization, the transition to a service model, the popularization of cloud infrastructure and import substitution, notes that customers for whom outsourcing is not an exotic service, give external performers more and more work. This largely solves the problems of the border area of ​ ​ responsibility, he believes.

Separately, it must be said about outsourcing in the cloud market. The growth rate of this segment is incredibly high, and we can definitely say that such a picture will continue in the coming years, - says the expert.

In addition, according to him, there has been a clear trend from working with a large number of outsourcing partners to one contractor who is able to ensure the most effective solution of all client tasks related to IT outsourcing.

ICL Services, speaking of current trends, reports that IT companies are now investing in the development of services related to technologies such as big data, mobility, cloud architectures, security and digital services. In addition, these companies began to pay more attention to specialized industry solutions in order to implement the real business cases of their customers.

There is an active specialization: vendors are looking for their own niches, large and medium-sized integrators are trying to find the most comfortable segment for work and are moving away from the approach of providing services to a wide profile of companies, ICL Services notes.

IDC data

2014

TAdviser data

According to TAdviser estimates, the volume of the IT outsourcing market in 2014 increased by 9% compared to last year and reached 66.3 billion rubles. Positive dynamics will continue in 2015 due to the fact that the outsourcing model with a high exchange rate of foreign currencies becomes much cheaper for many companies than investments in the development of their own IT.

TAdviser predicts the growth of the IT outsourcing market by the end of 2015 at the level of 5%, to 69.6 billion rubles.

Revenue of companies in the IT outsourcing market of Russia in 2014-2013 (in rubles, including VAT)

In 2014, there was a slowdown in the growth of the IT outsourcing market compared to 2013. This is due to the fact that in the last quarter of 2014, customers understood the situation and options for further action. The growth in the number of transactions in the market began after February 2015.

The profile of the projects themselves has also changed somewhat: from rapid development to increasing the efficiency of using existing resources. "This task is relevant for most customers, and the IT outsourcer, which has all processes debugged, solves it, as a rule, more efficiently than the internal IT service," says Yuri Panchenko, Deputy Director of the Service Center for Production Organization of Jet Infosystems.

"For AMTEL-SERVICE 2015, the crisis year was a year of opportunity and rapid growth. The key vector of the company's development and the main business area were IT outsourcing and service support services, - said Dmitry Koshkin, director of the commercial department of AMTEL-SERVICE. - IT outsourcing services are one of the most promising areas of the Russian IT market. The market will not be able to completely abandon support for IT systems as a function, but the crisis gives the owner of the IT infrastructure a reason to carefully assess and revise the cost of these services. As a rule, the result of optimization is a complete or partial transition to the IT outsourcing model, a change in the set and parameters of services, a change in external contractors, or a transition from multi-sourcing to one or a limited number of contractors. The current year 2015 is no exception: we are seeing the prolongation of service contracts in the corporate and public sectors, the growth of interest and the transition to full IT outsourcing of small companies, the transfer of support for the infrastructure of the branch network "in one hand." Also, it cannot but rejoice to increase the maturity of Russian companies in terms of IT outsourcing and cloud services. "

Major IT outsourcing projects

The largest IT infrastructure outsourcing projects in Russia in 2012-2015 *

№	Customer	Industry	Partner	Number of offices/outlets/stores	Geography	Details
1 |Russian Post	Services	MDG-Service (Maykor)	> 42 000	RF	Read more
2	Federal Treasury	Public sector	Сервионика ("I-Teco")	9500	RF	Read more
2	Federal Treasury	Public sector	Ai-Teko	9500	RF	Read more
3	UEC	Transport	MDG-Service (Maykor)	> 5 000	Moscow Region	Read more
4	Rosreestr	Public sector	"I-Teco"	2500	RF	Read more
4	Rosreestr	Public sector	Technoserv	2500	RF	Read more
4	Information and Analytical Center for Support of state automated system "Justice"	Public sector	Orbit Service	2500	RF	Read more
4	Pension Fund of Russia (PFR)	Public sector	Technoserv	2500	RF	Read more
5	MegaFon Retail	Trading |Maykor	1800	500 cities	Read more
6	Central Black Earth Bank (Sberbank of the Russian Federation)	Finance	Information Technology Center | 1424**	6 areas	Read more
7	Rostelecom	Telecom |Maykor	1200	Volga Federal District	Read more
8	Bashinformsvyaz	Telecom	Technoserv	800	Bashkortostan	Read more
9	Baltbet	Services |Maykor	600	190 cities	Read more
10	Rostelecom - Retail Systems (RRS)	Trading |Maykor	> 500	RF	Read more
10	"Financial Group Life "	Finance	Ai-Teko	> 500	RF	Read more
11	Post Bank (formerly Leto Bank)	Finance	Jet Infosystems	440	RF	Read more
12	Sberbank East Siberian Branch	Finance |Maykor | 430**	Eastern Siberia	Read more
13 |Kari	Trading |Maykor	403	RF	Read more
14	Life Group	Finance	Ai-Teko	360	RF	Read more
15	Fashion Continent (InCity)	Trading |Maykor	328	RF	Read more
16	FTS	Public sector	Technoserv	320	RF	Read more
17	Bank Otkritie	Finance |Maykor	300	RF	Read more
18	Children's World	Trading |Maykor	277	RF	Read more
19	Melon Fashion Group	Trading |Maykor	250	RF	Read more
20 |Oriola	Pharmaceuticals	Jet Infosystems	240	RF	Read more

Source: TAdviser Report, September 2015

* The information in the table is not a ranking. The projects in the table are arranged relative to each other in an order that roughly reflects their decrease in scale, based on the number of cities, points and users covered by the IT outsourcing contract

Among the largest Russian IT outsourcing projects in terms of coverage and scale, information about which is in the TAdviser database for 2012-2015, the Maykor project for the Russian Post stands out, which covered 42 thousand branches of the enterprise throughout Russia. Its amount is a record for the domestic market and amounts to 13.5 billion rubles for three years.

As follows from the TAdviser data presented in the table above, the most ambitious projects for outsourcing IT infrastructure support are implemented by state institutions or enterprises with state participation, such as Russian Post, UEC, Sberbank and Rostelecom.

Cost of IT outsourcing decreases

2014 was a period for many organizations to optimize IT costs and reduce costs.

"The trend of the last year for all companies was a decrease in capital expenditures (CAPEX) and an increase in the share of operating expenses (OPEX) in the cost structure. Cost optimization affected all areas of work, but attention was paid to IT divisions first of all, "says Nikita Dergilev, director of service and outsourcing at Technoserv.

According to him, among customers there was an increase in the number of those who seek to get a ready-made solution and switch to a subscriber model of service consumption. There are much fewer people willing to buy servers separately and solutions separately. "If 5-6 years ago companies in the market could still take care of the payback of funds invested in IT, now they are not ready to do this," he adds.

In the portfolio of Technoserv, according to Dergilev, there are more complex projects. They are characterized by a moderate increase in the customer's expenses with a significant increase in the volume of work provided to him. As a result, the customer receives savings by reducing or optimizing payments that he would have to bear if contracts with large vendors continued.

Another reason for the decline in the cost of outsourcing is due to the release of resources from contractor companies due to a sharp drop in market activity. In this regard, prices in rubles went down, says Denis Bondarenko, director of operations at ADV Consulting.

IT Service Providers Increase IT Outsourcing Competencies

Many IT service providers have already noticed market trends in IT outsourcing. For example, a year ago, the Technoserv portfolio had practically no agreements with vendors to provide infrastructure and services with a subscriber payment scheme.

"The past year was a time when we actively increased our expertise and expanded our product line, trying to increase the volume of outsourcing services provided. The list of vendors was significantly expanded, it included companies with which not everyone was familiar with the Russian market earlier. The world market has realized the very fact of changes and the opportunity for new players to begin active promotion in Russia, "Nikita Dergilev believes, adding that IT outsourcing has become one of the priority areas for the development of Technoserv.

In Softline, the turnover of IT outsourcing and technical support over the past year has grown by more than 30%. "We continue to expand the portfolio of services," says Vladimir Turlachev, head of this area.

Government agencies are eyeing comprehensive outsourcing

Government agencies can become the main engine for the active development of integrated IT outsourcing. Dergilev from Technoserv connects this with the fact that the level of training of IT personnel and the salary of IT specialists often does not allow government agencies to develop their own IT services at a sufficient level.

If state-owned companies follow the path of optimizing the staffing, then, most likely, auxiliary units, including IT services, will fall under the reductions. But at the same time, state structures are developing the functions of IT systems, which will require serious IT support (for example, in SMEV, electronic document management, public services portals).

"Moreover, in large government agencies - FMS, Rosrezerv, Rosreestr - there is a constant process of accumulating huge amounts of information and it is possible to work with this data only on the basis of IT," adds Dergilev.

Industrial enterprises can become new large customers

If now the main customers in the IT outsourcing market are government agencies, banks, telecom and energy companies, then in the next two to three years industrial enterprises may also be included in this list.

This is due to the process of the transition of industrialists to the use of "smart" machines and the modernization of design bureaus. Such changes require expertise and IT consultants. Often for industrial enterprises, IT is not a specialized area, which creates the prerequisites for growing interest in the development of IT outsourcing.

Market Split into Mass and Professional Segments

The IT outsourcing market in the future is likely to be divided into two segments: firstly, into the mass market of services, primarily tied to mobile applications and consumed from the public cloud, where small and medium-sized businesses will become the main customers. Secondly, to the market of professional services provided on the basis of private clouds, primarily in PaaS format. The main customer here will be the corporate segment.

"Hybrid IT is becoming the norm. Large companies in the corporate sector are increasingly preferring professional external data centers, "says Alexander Shchipkov from Borlas.

2013

TAdviser data

The IT outsourcing market, according to TAdviser estimates, in 2013 amounted to 60.88 billion rubles, which is 15% more than in 2012 (52.94 billion rubles). In 2012, IT outsourcing accounted for 20.3% of the total revenues of IT service companies, and in 2013 - about 20.5%.

Forrester Research Data

TAdviser estimates coincided with Forrester Research data, according to which, according to the results of 2012, the growth of the domestic IT outsourcing market amounted to 15%, and in 2013 - from 15 to 17%.

For comparison, according to TOP-30 IT outsourcing ^[4] (including service support) for 2013 according to Expert RA, their total income in 2013 amounted to more than 60 billion rubles.

The most frequent clients of outsourcing companies are financial organizations and banks, trading companies, as well as the public sector, power enterprises, telecom providers.

See more: Industry-specific IT outsourcing projects

TAdviser Experts on Market Characteristics

As the press service of Microsoft commented on TAdviser, today Russian companies are ready not only to form and provide IT services on their own, but also to outsource both simple tasks, for example, the service of certain types of IT equipment and infrastructure, and the maintenance of business-oriented systems of the company.

Irina Semenova, vice president of marketing at Maykor, believes that complex types of work are becoming more in demand in the Russian IT outsourcing market in 2013, the market is growing not only due to relatively simple and formalized works, such as classic IT outsourcing (ITO) or MPS (press outsourcing).

"According to Maykor's experience, IT customers are becoming more professional, most Chief information officers have already gained positive experience interacting with service providers and understand what to expect from the" right outsourcer, "" she said

.

Market participants note that the discussion of SLA parameters has ceased to be a simple formality - customers in 2013 fought for every share of the percentage, but at the same time they no longer seek to provide 100% SLA, that is, the theoretical complete absence of downtime. In addition, outsourcing is increasingly providing not only support for individual IT systems, but also infrastructure services. However, a "boom" in the IT outsourcing market in 2014 and beyond is not expected. TAdviser predicts that the market will maintain a healthy growth rate - at 15%.

In the context of the stagnation of the market, enterprises will definitely begin to transfer more and more IT functions for external service - only specialized companies will be able to concentrate high-tech expertise. The reduction of non-core IT functions and personnel will inevitably lead to an increase in the volume of IT outsourcing, agrees Alexander Shchipkov, Development Director of Borlas.

Microsoft notes that the structure of demand for IT outsourcing is changing.

"Initially, SMB sectors and startups that are not ready and do not see the point in forming IT infrastructures from scratch, but want to consume and use IT services today, showed great interest in IT outsourcing. But according to the results of last year, we can say that representatives of large businesses are no longer just actively interested, but also test and use various cloud scenarios depending on their tasks, "the company's experts noted in an interview with TAdviser in 2014

.

2012

Tadviser data

According to TAdviser, the IT outsourcing market in Russia in 2012 amounted to 52.94 billion rubles, or 20.3% of the entire IT services and IT outsourcing market.

Marketvisio and Orange Business Services Data

According to a joint 2012 study by Marketvisio and Orange Business Services (Orange Business Services, Equant), the level of outsourcing penetration into the Russian IT services market in 2012 was still noticeably lagging behind the same indicator in Western Europe, but domestic companies continued to develop dynamically in this direction. 37% of companies in the corporate segment already use IT outsourcing in one volume or another, and 28% of them plan to increase this item of expenses in 2012, transferring more and more powers to specialized IT providers.

Large businesses were then prompted to use outsourcing by insufficient expertise in the field of information technology, a lack of IT personnel and the lack of advanced technologies available to external IT providers. Among the restraining factors of outsourcing, respondents then named the high cost of third-party provider services in comparison with the maintenance of their own staff of specialists (47%) and the threat of losing control over their own data (32%).

The nature of outsourced services in 2012 was diverse, but among the most popular are three services. More than 40% of large companies outsourced the development of business applications and integration, followed by outsourcing of IT infrastructure and its management by a wide margin. Also, among the promising areas of outsourcing development, many companies named external contact center services and cloud computing, but in the near future they will not be able to change the overall market picture.

When choosing an IT service provider, companies took into account price conditions (36%), the quality of service provision (20%) and the possibility of comprehensive service (13%). When assessing quality, the possibility of concluding an SLA (service level agreement) for the services provided was of particular importance. The unwillingness of the provider to take financial responsibility was the reason for the refusal to switch to the outsourcing model of IT services for 10% of potential customers.

2011

Asteros data

In March 2011, the Asteros group presented a forecast for the development of the IT services market for 2011. The IT services market in 2011, according to the forecast made then, grew by 19% and amounted to about $4.9 billion. The growth leaders were the IT outsourcing segments of system integration and implementation of business applications and other software. The main driver of IT outsourcing will be the growth of the share of services under the SaaS model, and the direction as a whole will increase by 24%.

Russian IT Services Market 2009-2011

Forecast data for 2011
Asteros, 2010

See also

IT outsourcing (global market)
Industry specificity of IT outsourcing projects
Major SAP Solution Support Outsourcers - TAdviser Ranking

Notes