Software import substitution problems

In addition to successes and obvious achievements in the market, there are problems. The reverse side of the coin is too large to talk about it in passing - such an approach, with all its sparing our feelings of positivity, will not give the necessary depth of understanding of the processes taking place, which means it will not give the right direction for possible decision-making.

The most often called problems: the difficulties of migration and integration due to differences in architectures, financial difficulties, the lack of an integrated approach to replacing imports, the complexity of scaling systems. Literally every second expert mentions a personnel issue.

Painful personnel issue

It is relevant for many companies, says Alexander Zotkin, CEO of Houlmont. According to the expert, competition for highly qualified specialists in the market is very high. In addition, it is important for customers that employees with little experience or moving from another stack of technologies immerse themselves in work faster and bring results. Means of accelerating development are designed to solve this problem.

Personnel deficits can become one of the main restraining factors for the progress of import substitution. This opinion was expressed by Maxim Nartov, Business Development Director of Nexign.

Deep transformations require a large number of resources, in particular, qualified personnel, says Ivan Panchenko, co-founder and deputy general director of Postgres Professional. According to the expert, this direction is affected by a generally low level of application code development, as well as the consequences of "vendor lock-in" - a long-term "entanglement" of customers by foreign vendors. Most Russian database administrators studied at one time on the ecosystem of Oracle and Microsoft products, it is difficult for them to change habits and switch to another architecture. To help them adapt and at the same time raise a new generation of independent specialists, the company publishes free courses and books on PostgreSQL, conducts contests and internships for students, cooperates with universities and other educational organizations in Russia, and also holds the largest conference on Postgres in Russia - PGConf.Russia.

According to Evgeny Shishkov, Managing Director of Orion soft, the tasks of implementing and administering solutions bring a large amount of work, and if the staff is not ready for them, then these processes take much longer. Therefore, the company believes that Russian vendors need to focus on staff training and on joint educational programs with partners.

The lack of qualified specialists from the developer and the consumer can slow down the process of developing and implementing software, believes Mikhail Bocharov, Deputy General Director for Science of SiSoft Development JSC. In this regard, experts expect concrete steps from the state, primarily a clear position on import substitution. For example, a specialist proposes to stop teaching companies that have left the Russian market in state universities for state money to foreign software.

Alexander Pestunov, Deputy General Director of Sigma, says that the shortage of IT personnel is an objective and long-term problem. And the actions here are obvious: to grow the personnel reserve within companies, to work with universities and schools within the framework of career guidance programs, to be an attractive and reliable employer whose tasks and working conditions are of interest to IT specialists.

The Russian IT market is primarily faced with a shortage of qualified developers and analysts of complex and high-tech products. Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of BARS Group, spoke about this. To alleviate the situation, the state initiated a training program, increasing the number of educational programs for the training of IT specialists.

Pavel Shcherbinin, Director of Strategic Marketing in Mechanical Engineering at ASCON, expressed the opinion that the limited human resources on the part of IT integrators, and most importantly enterprises, is one of the key difficulties. After all, large projects of technical re-equipment imply the uprooting of old systems, the revision of design methods and the use of information systems. Serious requirements for information security are also imposed by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 166. This requires a substantial mobilization of forces, but not everyone is prepared for a significant expansion of the staff.

Ivan Skorodumov, General Director of EOS Group of Companies, said that customers often lack technical specialists who know how to install and administer Russian developments. According to him, the personnel issue must be resolved quickly. It is necessary to coordinate the efforts of the state as a regulator of the industry, educational institutions and leading developers in order to prepare a sufficient number of specialists both for working on domestic solutions and for their administration. The company, for its part, cooperates with many universities - conducts webinars and workshops, sends its specialists as lecturers to participate in thematic training courses and retraining specialists. However, all this must be done on a systematic basis, and not as initiatives of individual universities and episodic invitations of experts from developers.

Maybe, - the expert reflects, - it is worth including in the training programs familiarization courses on popular Russian software products: somewhere in general form, and for some specialties - with in-depth study.

At Arenadata, attracting and retaining talent is the most important strategic goal for the next three years, said Daria Verstelle, director of business development at the company.

We hold a number of complex events aimed at creating the best working conditions for experts on the market: from competitive payment conditions, interesting tasks and a full opportunity to participate in Open Source projects to flexible schedules, social packages, continuous training of employees and a healthy atmosphere in a team with all stops, "she said.

In addition, the company actively cooperates with Russian universities and helps their students gain knowledge in the field of the most modern domestic technologies for working with. data

Anton Shmakov, Technical Director of Astra Group, also noted an important role in solving the personnel issue for import substitution through the development of specialized educational programs in universities and advanced training of specialists.

Lack of competencies in information security

The topic of personnel competencies is closely aligned with the topic of the personnel issue, and from the point of view of market problems, the issue of information security of enterprises stands out here.

According to ARinteg, every third company in Russia has problems with correctly configuring data backup and recovery policies, that is, it is able to protect companies from ransomware attacks, the number of which continues to grow.

As the commercial director of ARinteg Dmitry Slobodenyuk said, the lack of experience, knowledge among personnel in the field of backups often leads to annoying inaccuracies when choosing the necessary tools and strategies for information security, as well as to incorrect execution of processes or to erroneous adjustment of various parameters.

Unfortunately, from our practice we see that often information is backed up on the same network, on the same servers, which makes them vulnerable to the ransomware, the expert complained.

Also, the careless mindset of the management of small companies directly relates to the issue of security, said Yuri Drachenin, deputy general director of Staffcop (Atom Security is part of the SKB Kontur Group of Companies).

They believe they will have no incidents, no attacks threaten them and staff will never become internal insiders. Therefore, they are in no hurry to replace foreign software, - the expert shared.

Yuri Drachenin also pointed out that the security of data stored in cloud environments deserves the most serious attention, because traditional protection methods can be ineffective, and cloud technologies are trending.

Difficulties of "translation" and scaling

One of the main problems facing companies is the legacy restrictions from Open Source products, as well as security risks, said Gleb Kalkutin, director of development at Quillis. The use of such software can lead to limited capabilities, difficulties in integrating with other systems, as well as insufficient flexibility to solve specific business problems.

According to Ivan Panchenko, co-founder and deputy general director of Postgres Professional, in the DBMS segment, like any other system software, one of the key problems is a rather complex migration from foreign products. The main reason is the differences in DBMS architectures. In some cases, migration can be compared with the complete reengineering of the system, and in terms of complexity - with the development of its new version (unless, of course, the system is developed on a platform that supports out-of-the-box migration, for example, 1C).

The expert noted that the migration process is also often influenced by the lack of full test coverage of application systems, which makes it difficult to formally verify it. The accelerated pace of import substitution and the encouragement of domestic vendors in the form of various benefits entailed the massive cloning of Open source systems under the guise of independent solutions. This not only inefficiently burns the forces of developers, but also makes migration difficult, as it forces you to spend time and resources also to choose between slightly different solutions.

As Evgeny Shishkov, Managing Director of Orion soft, said, today most companies have already passed the stage when everyone analyzed the domestic market and piloted individual solutions. We are actively moving to scale the selected products to the main systems. And one of the main challenges for customers now is the migration of large amounts of data and various systems in terms of composition. Therefore, the main task of vendors is to provide convenient tools so that the migration process is seamless, convenient, and meets all customer requirements. Many customers are concerned about integration issues. Not only infrastructure solutions are changing, but also application solutions, as well as information security solutions. But only part of the companies have already completely replaced foreign software products with domestic ones. Somewhere in parallel, both domestic and foreign solutions are used, somewhere in the transition to domestic software has not yet begun. As a result, there are a huge number of systems that need to be integrated with each other, there are problems at the junction of infrastructure software. And if interaction with domestic vendors is active, then foreign vendors are rather reluctant to make contact. As a result, integration often falls entirely on the shoulders of domestic manufacturers or customers.

Svetlana Markova, chief consultant at Neoflex, said that numerous critical infrastructure facilities are subject to import substitution in the financial sector, which are closely integrated into the landscape of organizations, are highly loaded and must meet high information security requirements. We are talking, for example, about an automated banking system, processing software, a layer of services for solutions for remote banking of individuals and legal entities. It is difficult to implement software from different vendors based on different DBMSs developed for different operating systems. Providing seamless, efficient and secure interoperability of all systems, building upgrade and disaster recovery processes is a difficult task that requires experienced system integrators with expertise in DevOps, DevSecOps.

Stanislav Shilov, Product Development Director of the BSS Center for Digital Business Solutions, considers the need to migrate existing application solutions to Russian system software (for example, DBMS) as a key import substitution problem. According to him, historically, almost all banks built their IT infrastructure on foreign solutions, and even with full-fledged Russian analogues, there is a need for complex, labor-intensive and long-term migration projects.

Complex relationships between corporate systems, the need to ensure the continuity of business processes, tight deadlines - all these are the natural difficulties of large import substitution projects, said Alexander Zotkin, General Director of Houlmont. For example, according to the expert, not all systems fundamentally allow import substitution of the server OS and DBMS. In some cases, Howlmont has to use its own modular software replacement technology. Its essence is that the functionality is put into operation gradually, in the transition period the old and new systems exist in parallel. In case of failure in one system, the second will ensure data safety and process continuity.

According to Mikhail Bocharov, Deputy General Director for Science of SiSoft Development JSC, there is no need to patch the digital ecosystem of the enterprise, replacing the software that has fallen out due to sanctions. Instead, it is necessary to understand that the import substitution process will be more dramatic in the very near future, and almost everything will have to be changed. Something for the reasons of the next sanctions, and something for information security reasons. Therefore, in order for the future integration of the replaced one to require less costs in the future, it is necessary at the first stage to focus on domestic software that works, including on the main domestic operating systems.

Obviously, the process of ensuring compatibility of Russian products of different classes has not yet been completed, - says Ivan Skorodumov, General Director of EOS Group of Companies.

In his opinion, this work should be done as quickly as possible, without shifting the testing of compatibility and performance of domestic software in stacks onto the shoulders of customers. In addition, vendors should speed up the transfer of Russian solutions to completely import-independent platforms that do not contain Western proprietary components. EOS followed the path of creating a fully independent EOS Platform, to which all the company's products that are initially tested for compatibility with Russian system software and office packages are gradually transferred.

As TAdviser was told in the press service of Magnit, if a year ago the main problem was the lack of domestic solutions in some functional areas, now manufacturers are gradually bringing them to the market, and the main difficulties lie in the quality and complexity of integration into the existing customer information stack. At the same time, for example, in large companies with high complexity, uniqueness and connectivity of business processes, there is a need for performance and fault tolerance of software and equipment due to the large number of transactions and users.

Pavel Shcherbinin, Director of Strategic Marketing in Mechanical Engineering "ASCON" said that many enterprises continue to work in previously acquired foreign systems. According to him, this will definitely continue for several more years, since even starting to develop new products using Russian software, specialists turn to developments from old software products. Accordingly, IT departments of enterprises should support these systems. There are also large product development projects launched in foreign software 5-10 years ago - replacing systems quickly, by clicking your fingers, will not work. For some time, enterprises will be forced to use foreign systems and their Russian counterparts in parallel. One of their tasks, as a software developer and integrator, in "ASCON" is seen in the ability to ensure the correct work of specialists in a heterogeneous environment.

The introduction of new software requires its integration with existing systems. This is especially difficult for large enterprises with a monolithic architecture of business systems, - said Kirill Timofeev, head of the information technology department of Obit. - For example, the process of replacing billing in the telecom industry is slow due to the complexity of the project for both companies and vendorov​.

Limited resources

Sergey Kuryanov, Director of Strategic Marketing at Docsvision, believes that the need to dramatically scale the functionality, performance and reliability of domestic software on an enterprise scale is the biggest problem. For the Docsvision vendor, these are hundreds of thousands of users and millions of documents per month, tens of millions of tasks and databases of tens of terabytes.

The problem of scalability has to be solved in conditions of insufficient funding, the expert said. State benefits to development enterprises are insufficient for rapid and large-scale development.

For some reason, they expected us to be cheaper than outgoing imports. Why? It turns out that it is normal to increase the cost of a domestic-assembled car by 2 times, and an increase in the cost of domestic software by 20% requires verification by the Accounts Chamber, he is surprised.

The financial side of the issue is important for the processes of import substitution and the further path to complete import independence. This opinion was expressed by Mikhail Bocharov, Deputy General Director for Science of SiSoft Development JSC. According to his experience, the established digital systems of enterprises during import substitution require significant financial injections, sometimes one-time.

Domestic developers often face problems financing their projects, shared Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of BARS Group.

In order to reduce this burden, the state allocates grants and initiates other support measures, creates conditions for reducing the tax burden on IT companies.

According to Pavel Shcherbinin, director of strategic marketing in mechanical engineering "ASCON," the bulk of the budget for large import substitution projects is occupied by the purchase of many licenses. And the issues of subsidies, grant support come first for many enterprises.

One of the key difficulties covering different industries is the distribution of budgets between numerous import substitution projects, says Maxim Nartov, Business Development Director at Nexign. The budget for the development of IT systems is limited, which creates intense competition among projects, which, in turn, becomes a slowing factor. In addition, in the future, there may be a reduction in financial support from the state.

As state information systems and counterparties switch to Russian software, additional costs will be required to modify formats and interaction interfaces, "said Georgy Podbutsky, Commercial Director of SL Soft.

According to him, focusing exclusively on import substitution cannot become the basis for innovation, today we should talk about the formation of our own innovative technological directions. But this requires multibillion-dollar long-term investments that cannot be secured by the operating capital of the IT companies themselves. Russian vendors need the opportunity to invest long-term and large-scale in the creation of complex technologies, as well as in high-quality client service, which was previously provided to customers by global players.

Only large companies can "pull" all these components - and the process of consolidation in the industry has begun, the expert stated.

According to Alexander Pestunov, Deputy General Director of Sigma, import substitution requires significant resources. The increasing volume of information security threats and requirements for reducing information security risks is reflected in the final cost and timing of projects.

According to Vladimir Egorov, Deputy General Director of Consyst Business Group, a TURBO vendor (part of the product line of IT holding LANSOFT), the import replacement process is not carried out quickly, requires resources from both the vendor and partners and customers. This is a big and difficult path, since the replaced solutions have industry-specific characteristics.

Therefore, as a vendor, we operate in conditions of limited resources and very carefully approach the tasks of developing platforms and products, - said Vladimir Egorov. - At the same time, we start primarily from the needs of customers and current projects.

According to the expert, "I always want more and faster," so the company tries to increase the value of implemented solutions at all levels of adding value, in the implementation of applied and specific solutions among partners and customers.

The development of domestic solutions requires significant financial investments and human resources, - said Kirill Timofeev, head of the information technology department of Obit. - Not all companies can afford such costs at a time, especially in conditions of economic instability.

According to the expert, the complexity of migration and training is an additional burden on finances. Mastering new software solutions always requires employee training and adaptation to new workflows. This can reduce productivity at the initial stage and requires additional investment in personala​​ training.

The economic factor makes itself felt especially when it is necessary to replace the infrastructure that has been built for years in a short time. This opinion was expressed by the commercial director of ARintegDmitry Slobodenyuk. According to the expert, IT budgets do not keep up with the rise in prices, and purchases of part of the equipment are postponed because of this, and this is fraught with the failure of outdated equipment.

For many, the issue of modernizing IT equipment will now become urgent: servers, storage systems, and so on, the average upgrade period of which is 3-8 years, he warned.

The limited size of the domestic market complicates the return on investment, said Anton Shmakov, technical director of Astra Group. According to the expert, this problem can be solved by entering foreign markets, for example, BRICS countries, as well as expanding its presence where sanctions do not apply.

We need to focus more on niche products, where there is no competition or it is small. I mean the development of specialized solutions for specific industries, "he shared. - And, of course, this issue helps to solve state initiatives, in particular, the decision to transfer the public sector and KII enterprises to domestic software.

According to Anton Shmakov, a complete rejection of foreign software requires time, investment and adaptation of business processes, which is an obstacle for commercial companies that do not replace foreign software as intensively as in the public sector, where there are also no full analogues in some specialized areas.

Need for an integrated approach

Many market participants recognize that substitution of imports should be an integrated process, during which entire developed ecosystems of solutions appear. So, for example, the director of information technology of Rosgeo JSC Pavel Solovyov speaks about this. According to him, the development of an open platform for automating the exploration of solid minerals should not only lead to the creation of a fully connected comprehensive set of solutions, but also facilitate the integration of new software products of domestic vendors. The expert stressed that the goal is to create an organically growing ecosystem.

Import substitution should be complex, otherwise it makes no sense, believes Ivan Skorodumov, General Director of EOS Group of Companies. This means that application software, system software, office packages, as well as the hardware base - all this must be mutually compatible.

So far, in some categories of software, the needs and many product options are completely closed, and somewhere - single developments, moreover, not completely functionally similar to Western ones, - the expert described the state of affairs.

In his opinion, this is a key problem of import substitution. Difficulties are overcome by coordinating the efforts of Russian IT companies from various segments and supporting problematic areas from the state.

The lack of full-fledged ecosystems of products - complex, working together solutions based on different types of hardware and software - is a serious problem, according to Arenadata.

We are proactively moving in this direction, developing technological alliances with other market players. In this matter, we are guided by the wishes of our customers, - said Daria Verstelle, director of business development at Arenadata.

The idea of moving to a healthy relationship in terms of specialization, which is supported by the Government, should help all market players. On the one hand, to create competitive solutions that will meet the requirements of customers, and on the other, to provide them with the fastest import substitution process and the possibility of further development, "commented Maxim Nartov, Business Development Director Nexign.

For customers, the most attractive opportunity now is to get all the necessary solutions from one supplier, - shared the opinion of Yuri Drachenin, Deputy General Director of Staffcop (Atom Security is part of the SKB Kontur Group of Companies).

Regulatory inconsistencies

According to Mikhail Bocharov, Deputy General Director for Science of SiSoft Development JSC, there are difficulties with regulatory legal and especially with regulatory and technical acts in the development and implementation of domestic software.

Their inconsistencies and frequent variability can complicate the process and increase the "threshold" for digitalization of construction, the expert said.

Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of Bars Group, argues in a similar way. According to her, at the state level, regulatory legal acts aimed at supporting and developing domestic software have long been developed and introduced. But sometimes the texts of these documents lack specifics and clear criteria.

Imbalance in the level of import substitution

According to Anton Varfolomeev, CEO of Digital Design"," there is a significant imbalance in the level of import substitution of server and client software (user workstations and mobile devices) in the market. Most organizations - both commercial and in the public sector - most often begin their path to import independence from server system OS(,) DBMS and application ON (,,, and ECM ERP BPM EDMS other systems).

The prerequisites for this approach, according to the expert, are two. The first is that such software is most often the most expensive in the organization's infrastructure. Accordingly, it is this item of expenses that is advisable to optimize before the rest. The second reason is due to the fact that there is no need to force end users to significantly change their habits - they may not even notice the replacement of the server infrastructure, continuing to use applications they know in their workplaces and devices.

For example, for a long time we have been doing projects to switch from the Microsoft Exchange email server to the domestic CommuniGate Pro. At the same time, users continue to work from their usual Outlook application. As for mobile devices, we can state that there are practically no real alternatives to Apple and Android platforms now. We have implemented several projects to implement the manager's mobile application for the Priority EDMS on the domestic Aurora mobile OS - but this is still more exotic than an ordinary story, - said Anton Varfolomeev.

Excessive competition

Many large companies began to develop their own IT divisions. So there is a large number of narrow-niche products and, to some extent, excessive competition. This leads to delays in the implementation of any import substitution projects, since developing a solution from scratch is a long and resource-intensive process. This opinion was expressed by Maxim Nartov, Business Development Director of Nexign.

The desire of large customers, instead of using vendor products, to develop their own development based on Open Source further blurs the expertise on the market, says Daria Verstelle, director of business development at Arenadata.

According to her, the relatively old story "in house development against the vendor product" naturally declines. Many large customers tried to follow this thorny path and came to the conclusion that almost always the use of specialized vendor solutions is more convenient and profitable in many respects. Among them are understandable SLA, coordination with upstream, technical support, training of specialists, equipment with an ecosystem, return on investment and an understandable knowledge transfer system.

Difficult to achieve perfect quality

After 2022, the tasks that suddenly arose before the developers were solved in an accelerated manner, and this gave the market many new products that did not always meet the requirements of customers in terms of functionality and quality. This observation was shared by Ivan Skorodumov, General Director of the EOS Group of Companies.

According to the expert, now the requirements for the quality of domestic solutions are gradually changing, and the maturity of products will grow accordingly. So far, there are still gaps in various software classes. For some tasks, alternatives to Western software do not meet the criteria of reliability and convenience, or do not close all tasks.

The replicated products are now at the initial stage of their development, said Alexander Zotkin, General Director of Houlmont. We are working on the creation of systems, actively contribute companies that were engaged in the implementation of foreign software and have accumulated the necessary expertise and understanding of customer needs. However, so far Russian products have not received sufficient experience in use, there are no solutions that could dominate the market.

It is not easy to find domestic analogues of operating systems, remote access services and database management systems, said Ilya Gorshkov, Managing Director for Information Technology at VESNA. According to the expert, special difficulties are observed in the industrial sector, where companies depended on imported equipment based on Western software. Switching to local solutions requires resources and time. Therefore, in the industrial sector, there is a high demand for PLM systems (product or product life cycle management systems), embedded operating systems and hardware and software complexes.

VESNA, as a software developer, solves import substitution problems by creating its own products. We take open source software, check it for vulnerabilities and malicious code, and then based on this we create our own IT solutions for key sectors of the economy, "the expert shared the recipe.

The lack of ideal solutions in many areas is one of the real barriers, stated Maxim Nartov, director of business development at Nexign. He said that there are markets in which Russian solutions were among the leaders: BSS, information security solutions, communication services and others. Nevertheless, in many segments, domestic manufacturers have long been under pressure from external vendors and suppliers, which often led to difficulties in adapting products. For example, the ERP systems market faced this, where it was not clear how to successfully launch a Western solution taking into account domestic requirements and regulators. As a result of the lack of practice and the necessary demand, Russian suppliers, at the moment, cannot provide full functional coverage in terms of areas.

The main problem of import substitution is that they remembered it late, "says Artem Kostryukov, General Director of Test IT.

According to the expert, the creation of mature and competitive domestic solutions for various industries and business processes takes years. It is extremely difficult to make a full-fledged analogue of a foreign service in 1-2 years, and Russian customers are still skeptical about the prospect of replacing the usual services with new ones.

However, the situation is unlikely to return to status quo ante, so decisions must be made boldly, - said Artem Kostryukov. - For example, we are in pain, but we are moving from Microsoft services to Russian ones, and we have already replaced the Atlassian stack with a bundle of TeamStorm and Test IT. Many of our customers are moving in the same direction, albeit at different speeds.

The competitiveness of domestic software is a serious problem, said Elvira Gilmanova, Deputy General Director of Bars Group. According to her, one should not forget about such aspects as consumers' habit of certain software products and systems and the need to train users. To bypass this difficulty, the state stimulates the use of domestic software at the legislative level.

According to Kirill Timofeev, head of the Obit information technology department, many specialized programs, especially in such areas as logistics, power and production, still do not have full-fledged Russian analogov​. This makes the transition difficult as it takes time and resources to develop new platforms.

According to Pavel Solovyov, Information Technology Director of Rosgeo JSC, among the problems facing the ICC "Subsoil Use." Exploration "is not particularly" dramatic. " However, specialists sometimes face a lack or shortage of domestic equipment for use in the field. And at the "entrance" there is a "weak" UI of domestic solutions, so sometimes there is a reverse migration of users who are accustomed to using foreign tools.

Large customers often require specific features to which they are accustomed, and users may experience inconvenience due to an unfamiliar interface. This experience was shared by Yuri Drachenin, Deputy General Director of Staffcop (Atom Security is part of the SKB Kontur Group of Companies). According to him, this problem is being solved, including through operational software refinement and user training.

Now many Russian products are only developing towards the complex functionality and technological level of Western vendors and the choice of any of the available solutions represents a certain set of compromises. This was TAdviser told in the press service of the company "Magnit."

We see this especially clearly in ERP systems for large enterprises. However, we are confident that as the quality and functional completeness of Russian developments grow, it will be easier and more convenient to use them than until recently foreign counterparts, - said the retail network professionals.

As the commercial director of ARinteg Dmitry Slobodenyuk said, after the departure of foreign players, many niche solutions were without competitive domestic software, companies sometimes had to be replaced by less technological products. And although domestic solutions in recent years have received the strongest technological impetus for development, they are still inferior to many Western counterparts, since those solutions have developed for decades.

According to Anton Shmakov, technical director of Astra Group, the company sees a technological gap with foreign vendors. To reduce the backlog, according to the expert, investments in research and development (R&D), increased funding for research projects and incentives for innovation are needed.

One of the main problems of import substitution is the quality of some Russian software products, the expert believes. - It is able to solve the implementation of best practices and technologies of secure development.

According to Anton Shmakov, to solve this problem, you need to focus on improving the user experience, regularly conduct research and surveys, and then it will be possible to significantly improve both the interfaces and the functionality of the software.

The result of the problem associated with the quality of software is insufficient user confidence in Russian products, the expert said. Here, popularization, training of customers and partners, access to full-fledged expert technical support and wide practice of pilot projects will play a positive role.

See also

• Import substitution of software in the public sector
• Import substitution in state-owned companies
• Import substitution of software in higher educational institutions
• Import substitution of information technologies in banks
• Import substitution of information technologies in industry
• Import substitution of software in the public sector
• Import substitution of computer equipment and microelectronics
• Import substitution in Russia
• Import substitution in the field of information security