"The most unreasonable thing is to plan the development of a large-scale system." Matsotsky, Gens and Kasperskaya gave forecasts of the development of the IT market

TAdviser studied the mood of IT industry participants. Photo - afca.cl

General expectation - the Russian IT market will grow in 2022

Analysts are optimistic about the prospects of the domestic IT industry, predicting its growth in the coming years. For example, in the "pandemic" 2020, IDC predicted a double increase in the market from $24.18 billion in 2020 to $50 billion in 2024. But do those who work "in the field" agree with such an assessment. Opinions were divided. If some unconditionally agreed with analysts, others expressed skepticism, believing that the world economy is in a zone of turbulence, and there are many scenarios that can lead not to development, but to market stagnation.

Analysts "forecasts do not take into account the many factors that call into question the multiple growth of the IT industry. Firstly, issues with the production of electronic components have not yet been resolved. Secondly, a significant increase in the price of logistics is of great importance. Thirdly, energy generation difficulties continue in China, which increases the production time for IT equipment. Inflation processes with major currencies must also be taken into account. As a result, all these factors will affect the growth in the cost of the final product. Therefore, in the current conditions, it is worth taking a realistic-pessimistic approach: growth in 2022-2024 can be 40-50%, "said Alexey Melnikov, general director of Marvel-Distribution, to TAdviser.

In 2020-2021, we saw how the digitalization of everything increased sharply. Workstations, data centers, networks: due to the pandemic, the load on everything increased, much required modernization. This trend for investment in IT infrastructure will continue to develop in 2022. First of all, large-scale projects in the field of guest will continue. The state will not just point-automate the processes of public administration, as before, but will become the locomotive of digitalization of the whole country. Therefore, there will be growth, its dynamics will depend on the general state of the economy and on how much investment the state will be ready to make in IT, "said Sergey Matsotsky, founder of GS Invest holding, to TAdviser.

On average, the Russian market in 2020 grew by 15%, and the public sector informatization market - by 30%. If we take into account that the state is the main driver of the Russian IT market, and that the preliminary results of 2021 promise to be no lower than the results of 2020, then the estimates of IDC analysts look quite plausible. In the future of five years, double market growth is quite possible. This year, the market is likely to show growth of more than 10%, largely due to the continued informatization of the public sector and the development of remote services in various areas of the economy, "Nikolai Podobailo, CEO of Software Product, shared with TAdviser.

The last couple of years - when individual events could drastically change the market and overstretched the general level of uncertainty - taught players special caution in forecasts and a thorough analysis of current dynamics. In general, the IT market is likely to continue to grow in the face of a continuing lack of infrastructure, components, and increased demand for IT professionals. Obviously, development, outsourcing, outstaffing, information security and cloud technologies will actively develop. And the classic "iron" integration is becoming less and less noticeable in the market, "the president of the LANITFilipp Gens group of companies carefully assessed the situation in communication with TAdviser.

2022 will be interesting. We are already seeing the emergence of new market trends: infrastructure consolidation and product development on a microservice architecture. We believe that the market for private clouds and platform cloud solutions awaits strong growth. This will affect the annual growth of the entire IT market, which in volume can grow to 20%, including due to an increase in the share of consulting and cloud services, "said TAdviser General Director of MyOffice Dmitry Komissarov.

Clouds and Microservice Architecture to Become Enterprise Standard

Describing the factors that will determine the market in 2022, almost all survey participants named cloud technologies. Accelerating the migration of services to the clouds is a global trend that many analytics agencies, whether Forrester, IDC or Gartner (Read more), note. The pandemic spurred the transition of companies, forced to rethink the role of clouds in the business of companies, including Russian ones.

Unlike other industries, the IT market in 2020-2021 showed quite confident growth: digital projects allowed business to cope with the challenges of pandemic and post-pandemic. For many IT products, coronacrisis has become a catalyst for active demand. It is companies with a high level of digital maturity that have proven to be more resilient, risk-sensitive and capable of rapid transformation. This is clearly seen in the example of B2C industries, they quickly adapt technologies in a competitive consumer market. According to the results of two COVID years, we see that banks, telecom, retail digitalize faster and feel more confident. In 2021, the transformation became much more conscious, many debugged the processes of remote and hybrid work, returned to IT strategies and planning. Most likely, in 2022 the same approach will continue. We associate high expectations with the cloud direction. The clouds proved their irreplaceability in crisis mode, the business began to treat them with great confidence, evaluating the capabilities of scaling, speed and cost optimization, as well as access to locally unattainable technologies, "said SAP CEO CISandrei Filatov to TAdviser.

Previously, the transition to the cloud was perceived as an opportunity to save on capital investments in infrastructure. Now these are fundamentally different motives. In cloud platforms, tools have appeared that will multiply the speed of systems, processing and storage, implement projects based on AI, AR and other advanced technologies. The cloud will become a "booster," both for business and the public sector, "explained Sergey Matsotsky.

At the same time, Dmitry Komissarov draws attention to the fact that information systems will be consolidated on the basis of cloud infrastructure in 2022. Because companies can use their IT resources more flexibly. Centralizing the infrastructure will avoid duplication of software on disparate servers, creating copies of integrated systems, and maintaining multiple data warehouses at once. In addition, consolidated IP accelerates communication within the organization.

Risks must be taken into account. So, consolidation based on classic monolithic architecture software has scale limits. Solutions based on the Cloud Native approach can overcome this limitation. It will become a key trend in the IT market in 2022. Cloud Native solutions are built as a set of microservices, weakly connected to each other and packaged in containers. Such container applications are automatically managed by cloud platforms, and the microservice architecture itself can scale to levels that are difficult to achieve in monolithic, "said Dmitry Komissarov.

The role of the state and state orders will grow

All participants in the study cited the state import substitution policy as one of the key factors determining the development of the market. Not in all areas is the process equally successful, but there is noticeable progress with both software and iron. State policy played into the hands of domestic developers, made it possible to launch new industries and pushed global players to discuss the localization of industries.

I would not expect a radical change in trends in 2022, another question is that the trends that we already see today in the market will accelerate. The hottest topic for large companies will be import substitution in both software and hardware, "Sergey Krylov, vice president of strategy at Rostelecom, shared his opinion with TAdviser.

The priority for the Russian IT market in 2022 will be the formation of the country's digital sovereignty. The reason for this is the increase in geopolitical risks. We are already well aware of examples of forced disconnection of imported equipment through a satellite at Gazprom enterprises in 2019 or the refusal of foreign developers to sell licenses for their software to Rosatom and MSTU. named after Bauman. And in 2021, we carried out news about the ban by the Bureau of Industry and Security of the US Department of Commerce on supplying American software for MIPT, the leading technical university in Russia, "Dmitry Komissarov explained.

In parallel with import substitution, a digital transformation of public administration was launched. As a result, the state has become the largest consumer of IT. This market turned out to be so large that it took shape in a separate direction of IT guests.

Russia is among the leading countries in terms of digitalization of the public sector - and this has borne fruit. So, during the pandemic, it was the presence and wide distribution of various services that ensured the interaction of the state and citizen that made it possible to quickly establish targeted assistance to needy categories of citizens and stimulated the development of the economy through targeted subsidies. However, revolutions should not be expected yet - the development of IT in the public sector will be evolutionary. "Super services" will develop, and everything related to improving the quality of life of citizens, their interaction with the state. This includes IT segments such as healthcare and social informatization, public urban transport, public services at the regional and municipal levels. State subsidy programs will allow the development of both the Russian software sector and the Iron. The growth of the software sector will also undoubtedly be facilitated by tax incentives for Russian IT companies, "says Nikolai Podobailo.

Partly Sergey Matsotsky does not agree with him, in his opinion, the guest market will develop hopefully.

In the next 2-3 years, we must make a big leap in the field of digitalization of public administration: now the state is the source of the most interesting projects that exist in Russia, about a third of the budget for custom software development falls on state projects. Given this, it can be assumed that changes in the guest will affect the commercial segment, "Sergey Matsotsky analyzes the market situation.

In his opinion, the following will have a significant impact on the IT market:

• The transformation of the electronic digital signature (EDS) market, signatures will appear in all organizations, the next step will be their mass issuance to citizens;
• Implementation of Human Resources Electronic Document Management (KEDO). This will greatly simplify the interaction of organizations with remote employees;
• Use of electronic consignment notes;
• Launch of a single digital platform in the field of employment and labor relations "Work in Russia."

Open Source Solutions Market to Grow Markedly

The result of the state import substitution policy was the development of the domestic Open Source developer community. The use of free software allows you to quickly bring new products to the market.

The trend for wide use of Open Source solutions will continue and intensify. The Russian open code community is one of the most significant and fastest growing. Our programmers and companies are actively involved in the implementation of international projects, in particular, in the creation of open-source database management systems (DBMS). Here you can name the DBMS ClickHouse and the library of machine learning CatBoost from Yandex and the DBMS Tarantool from VK ( formerly Mail.Ru - approx. Editors), - concludes Sergey Matsotsky.

IB solutions become complex and platform-based

The massive transition to a remote location made corporate services and business information more vulnerable, which immediately provoked a wave of hacker attacks. In 2020-2021, new types of attacks for the market were identified in Russia, unprecedented DDoS attacks on entire industries were recorded. So, in 2021, the banking sector suffered. As a result, the demand for IB solutions of different classes has increased, and in 2022 this trend will continue.

In 2021, according to our preliminary estimates, the growth of the IS market in Russia amounted to more than 10%. Kaspersky's growth in the Russia, CIS and Baltic regions turned out to be much more than these figures. Moreover, taking into account the growing range of potential threats and the level of their complexity, we expect a general increase in demand for integrated IBS solutions in most industries and, accordingly, further market growth, "says TAdviser Managing Director of Kaspersky Lab in Russia and the CIS countries Mikhail Pribochiy.

Mikhail Pribochy believes that in 2022 the trend identified a year earlier will be fixed: Russian companies and government agencies began to comprehensively solve cybersecurity issues. Customers are increasingly building their IB systems on the basis of security solutions of one vendor, which provides easy management of the entire system, provides simple and efficient integration of individual products. This is critical because virtually all processes require a high level of security.

According to Natalia Kasperskaya, President of GK InfoWatch and Chairman of the Board of ARPP Domestic Software, the Russian IS market is developing in line with global trends, and will be among the fastest growing in 2022. Moreover, in her opinion, the business is reviewing its attitude towards IS.

Our market will continue to grow by 15-20% per year. The main trend of the year on the part of customers is the construction of platform solutions with the receipt of part of the expertise from the vendor at the expense of consulting. At the same time, platform IB solutions accumulate huge amounts of data in themselves, which have become in demand not only in the IB, but, for example, in personnel services or heads of the enterprise as a whole. Therefore, in 2021, the trend was very noticeable for the business to receive deep analytics from the IB service. Previously, he was not so obvious, "Natalya Kasperskaya shared her observations with TAdviser.

The number of projects with AI will multiply

Interest in AI has increased markedly in recent years. This is due, among other things, to the technological policy of the state, which has identified AI as one of the priority areas of development. The situation is pushed by the personnel hunger observed in many industries, and attempts to increase the margin of business through automation and robotization of business processes.

"AI solutions are in demand in almost all sectors of the economy," Natalya Kasperskaya said. Photo - FondMX

The head of Marvel-Distribution, Alexei Melnikov, believes that the number of processed data increasingly increases the need for automation and robotization of processes.

Dmitry Komissarov adheres to the same point of view, who is confident that under the pressure of the pandemic and digitalization problems, the trend towards the use of AI technologies, including machine learning, data analysis and solving routine problems, is increasing.

Natalya Kasperskaya is sure that AI solutions are in demand in almost all sectors of the economy, in addition, the country is actively digitalizing the economy, so you should wait for the explosive growth of the AI market.

It is curious that many participants in the TAdviser study somehow mentioned AI as important trends, but none of them began to develop the topic. Apparently, despite the importance of big data, RPA, machine learning and similar technologies, the AI market is considered only as a tool with which routine business tasks are solved.

All large companies will have an ESG agenda

At the same time, a new direction of ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) has already appeared on the current business agenda. So far, according to the head of SAP CIS Andrei Filatov, the ESG agenda has appeared only in the strategies of advanced Russian companies. And after a while, this will most likely become an obligation to the regulator. Exporters focused on foreign markets will be the first to introduce ESG metrics, but then green technologies in any form will enter the mandatory technology stack for any companies.

We already see the need for specific solutions that will help businesses track indicators of sustainable development, do this as transparently as possible, and not only by their processes, but also by analyzing the processes of counterparties. Calculate emissions in all areas: direct emissions, energy used and transport, goods purchased. Having introduced such a system, the company will monitor all its processes related to CO2 emissions and plan activities in order to reduce the volume of the "carbon footprint," abandoning certain sources of it, "predicts Andrei Filatov.

Uncertainty caused by the global crisis will force companies to be more cautious about implementing IT

As Alexey Melnikov notes, the dynamics in various IT sectors will be different, and not all areas will grow. Factors such as the logistics disrupted by the pandemic, the semiconductor deficit and the acute shortage of skilled personnel negatively affect the market, restraining its development.

According to Natalia Kasperskaya, the Russian market in 2022 will face the fact that many IT consumers will begin to roll back to "pre-digital" solutions. Due to the high speed of development, software is often rolled out "raw" to the market.

The state is actively influencing the pace and scale of digitalization. However, the immaturity and underperformance of some IT solutions, their too hasty introduction to the market, complete or partial lack of availability causes widespread irritation to users. Such decisions will have to be recalled and corrected, "says Natalya Kasperskaya.

Philippe Gens recommends that companies be extremely careful due to market instability in the implementation of IT.

In my opinion, this year, companies should be especially careful in planning their IT development. Since there will be a shortage of infrastructure, and may even worsen. Previously, failure-free supply chains can fail, as was the case last year. Therefore, perhaps grandiose plans to develop your own IT systems should be postponed, trying to make the most of the available resources. The most unreasonable thing that can be done now is to plan the development of a large-scale system. Since there is a high risk of ordering infrastructure and not getting it. Or, on the contrary, buy "iron," plan development at new capacities and not find the right specialists on the market. Unfortunately, recently this has been happening more and more often, "warns Philip Gens.

Sergey Matsotsky largely agrees with this position. In his opinion, one of the trends of 2022 is the desire to systematize and reuse what has already been done in the process of previously launched digital transformation initiatives. Successful pilot projects require continuation and subsequent scaling, and for this it is advisable to turn to platform solutions in which much is already standardized, unified and allows different departments of companies to use a single tool to fulfill their unique tasks. Sergey Matsotsky believes that there is no point in inventing another bicycle in a crisis.

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