Red Hat Russia and CIS

2022: Termination of work with organizations from Russia and Belarus

Red Hat decided to break off partnerships with all companies located or having headquarters in Russia or Belarus. This became known on March 8, 2022. The company also stops selling its products and providing services in Russia and Belarus. As for employees in Russia and Ukraine, Red Hat expressed its readiness to provide them with assistance and all necessary resources^[1].

2017: New regional manager in Russia - Maxim Semenikhin

In January 2017, Red Hat announced the appointment of Maxim Semenikhin as regional manager in Russia and the CIS. His predecessor Sergey Bugrin moved to a new job - to ITSirius as deputy general director for development.

2014: Sanctions due to the crisis in Ukraine. Letter to partners

In July 2014, CNews had at its disposal a letter sent from Red Hat's Russian representative office to its domestic partners in May 2014. In this letter (original text in PDF) signed by Phil Andrews, vice president of Red Hat in Northern and Eastern Europe, the company instructs its partners to suspend projects with their Russian customers in connection with the imposition of sanctions^[2]

Phil Andrews explains the suspension of projects with part of Russian companies in his letter of May 20, 2014 by issuing USA presidential orders No. 13660, 13661 and 13662. These documents, issued between March 6 and March 20, 2014, prohibit Americans and American companies from participating in transactions with persons involved in the events on. To Ukraine The list of these persons is determined by the US Department of Finance.

The exact list of recipients of the letter is not known, but Red Hat calls on its website Russian partners (in order of mention) Ai-Teko, Inventa, Jet Infosystems, IT Sirius, Mezon.RU (Linuxcentre), R-Style and Technoserv.

2013: Business growth in Russia - 55%

At the end of 2013, Red Hat's revenue in Russia grew by 55%, Sergey Bugrin, director of business development in Russia and the CIS, told TAdviser. According to him, the initially set goal of 80% growth was an ambitious plan. The achieved indicator is the best in the region, which includes the countries of Scandinavia, Great Britain and Eastern Europe, he adds.

Speaking about what became the main drivers of the growth of the Red Hat business in Russia, Bugrin noted that the past year was the first year of work, when the local sales channel was rebuilt in a completely new way. At the end of 2012, the company changed its distributor - instead of NCPR ("National Center for Support and Development"), it became Axoft, and in 2014 this status was assigned to another company - Mont. They provided good support to large system integrators implementing Red Hat products, said Sergey Bugrin. In total, as of the beginning of 2014, Red Hat has more than a hundred partners in Russia.

In addition, the company expanded the Russian office - it now employs nine people instead of three earlier. Sergey Bugrin notes that his company is increasing both technical competence in Russia and the direction of sales.

In 2013, Red Hat expanded its portfolio of products offered in Russia.

The bulk of the turnover in 2013, as before, fell on the flagship product Red Hat Enterprise Linux. At the same time, the portfolio of products offered in Russia has expanded. The company began selling cloud solutions, including Open Stack as an additional tool for virtualization. Among the new products in this area are CloudForms for managing cloud infrastructure. The Director of Business Development Red Hat in Russia and the CIS notes that the company is observing the demand for such solutions and the appearance of the first projects.

For 2014, the company set the task of promoting its intermediate software - the JBoss family of solutions, says Sergey Bugrin. To do this, Red Hat both teaches partners on these solutions and develops its own competence. In addition, the company is developing the direction of storage solutions .

"In the near future, we expect an increase in sales of our Linux distribution in Russia, but we position ourselves not only as a developer of just such software, but also rely on expanding the range of other products, in the field of clouds and virtualization, in particular," said TAdviser regional director Red Hat in Russia.

At the end of 2014, the company expects "double-digit growth rates" in Russia, says Sergey Bugrin. He preferred not to comment on the political and economic situation prevailing in 2014 on the local business of the company, noting only that, despite these circumstances, the number of Red Hat projects in Russia is growing.

"I would say that our decisions began to be considered more often than a year ago. Customers have begun to save more actively. The model under which we work is a support fee, there is no payment for licenses. Therefore, our solutions cost the customer cheaper than the products of many other vendors. In addition, customers began to pay more attention to Open Source solutions as part of an increased interest in the topic of import substitution, "he says.

Speaking about competition in Russia, Bugrin notes that, on the one hand, it is composed of international distributions, for example, Suse Linux, and on the other hand, "clones" of Red Hat products produced by local companies.

2012: Development Strategy in Russia

According to the results of 2012, Red Hat's revenue in Russia amounted to about $3 million, a source well aware of the activities of the company's local representative office told TAdviser on March 29, 2013. According to him, in 2013, the representative office was tasked with increasing this indicator by 80%.

The main source of revenue for a company in Russia is support for distributions of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS through a paid subscription, which includes technical support, receiving updates, etc. It is worth noting that the Russian representative office Red Hat, opened in 2011, does not conduct commercial activities: it is carried out through the legal entity of the company, registered in Ireland.

Such modest by the standards of the software market financial indicators in Russia for 2012 source TAdviser explains several factors. Red Hat solutions are "much cheaper than similar products of large vendors like Oracle," he says, so "even with the same number of projects, the difference in revenue from them will differ tenfold." Among other factors is the small staff of the Russian representative office Red Hat (at the beginning of 2013 it totaled only three people), as well as the lack of serious activities to promote Red Hat products in the Russian market.

"A deterrent can be called the general lack of awareness of many customers in Russia about what an ACT is," the TAdviser interlocutor adds. "Many companies see the absence of programmers specializing in such software as an obstacle to its use."

The representative of one of the major software developers with whom TAdviser talked believes that it would be difficult to get substantial revenue on a commercial subscription to OS distributions in Russia alone: "The practice of such a subscription in our country is not widespread, with completely free versions of commercial products, and in the case of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this is its re-assembly of CentOS and Scientific Linux - the user will prefer to use the latter."

Red Hat expects to increase business turnover in Russia in 2013 due to the promotion of a wider range of commercial products in the market, including virtualizations Red Hat Enterprise Linux Virtualization an intermediate-level platform and software. JBoss In addition, Red Hat expects to significantly increase its marketing activity in Russia and strengthen its work with partners, a TAdviser source says.

In connection with the above plans, Red Hat in 2012 replaced the exclusive local distributor, with whom it worked for many years. Since 2004, it was a company NTSPR ("National Support and Development Center"), and at the end of 2012, Red Hat transferred this status to the company. Axoft

In cooperation with the NCPR, sufficient generation of user requests for Red Hat products in Russia was not provided, the TAdviser interlocutor said: "The company was able to develop the market to a certain extent, but could not build a normal partner network."

As of March 2013, Red Hat continues to cooperate with the NCPR, but already in the status of an ordinary partner, adds the interlocutor of TAdviser. The NCPR itself at the time of publication of the material did not comment on the loss of the exclusive distribution status of Red Hat.

The company's largest projects in Russia until 2013 are the transfer from HP-UX to its operating system of the MICEX trading platform ( 50 high-end HP Superdome servers), which was completed in 2012, as well as the migration of large IT systems from Oracle Server SPARC to Enterprise 5 HOS-based servers. The last project in early March 2013 TAdviser became known from the operator himself.

According to the same source TAdviser, who is well acquainted with the activities of Red Hat, in Russia at the beginning of 2013, the company is working on a number of projects. The main bet, he said, Red Hat makes on customers among financial organizations, telecom companies, as well as in the public sector.

2011: Opening of the representative office, head - Sergey Bugrin

In early August 2011, the company, Red Hat the developer of the distribution of the same name, Linux opened a Russian representative office. He was headed by Director, Bugrin Sergey IBM Large projects at IBM EE/A. A record of this appeared on his page in the professional social network. LinkedIn