Gontarev Pavel Aleksandrovich

Gontarev Pavel Aleksandrovich

Biography

Pavel Gontarev was born on April 8, 1980.

From 1987 to 1995 he studied at school number 10 of the city of Severomorsk.

In 1997 he graduated from the Academic Gymnasium of St. Petersburg State University.

In 2002 he graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University with a degree in Finance and Credit.

2005: Career in SAP CIS

Since 2005, Gontarev has been working in SAP CIS. Holding various positions in sales and business development, he was responsible for a number of industry practices, including power, telecom, industry and the public sector. He curated transformation programs for several of SAP's largest and most strategically important customers in the CIS. He led business in the CIS countries, and also headed the direction of interaction with the public sector and state corporations in the Russian Federation.

In 2015, he served as Deputy General Director, Director of the cluster "State Enterprises and CIS Countries."

2016: Appointment as CEO of SAP CIS

In March 2016, Pavel Gontarev was appointed CEO of SAP CIS. In this role, he was responsible for increasing operational efficiency, strategic planning and improving the company's performance in the region.

In this post, he replaced Vyacheslav Orekhov, who headed SAP CIS since 2014, who continued to work in the Asia-Pacific region of SAP.

2018: Unexpected dismissal from SAP

From January 1, 2018, Pavel Gontarev left the post of general director. SAP CIS Temporary acting Natalia Parmenova, who works as the executive director of the company, was appointed general director. PR Director of SAP CIS Tatiana Zvereva said TAdviser that "at the moment the company is being determined with the candidacy of the CEO," from which it can be concluded that the dismissal of Pavel Gontarev was unplanned.

2019: Moving to work in Mail.ru

In April 2019, Pavel Gontarev joined the Mail.ru Group, where he headed a new business area that the company creates - Mail.ru Digital Technologies ^[1]]. Gontarev told Vedomosti that it would become a supplier of corporate IT solutions. According to him, Mail.ru Group has accumulated a lot of technologies that will now have to be "packed" as products and offered to customers.

There will be five products. This is the Tarantool database developed by the holding, cloud solutions, platforms for corporate communications (email and messenger), corporate social networks and services for analyzing big customer data, Gontarev lists.

Gontarev does not disclose the revenues of the future business, but within five years the indicator should be comparable to the Russian revenue of global IT companies. SAP CIS in 2018 earned 472.5 million euros.

According to Pavel Gontarev, the Mail.ru Group saw a new niche between the products of traditional IT vendors, the main motivation of which is earnings on royalties, and the business of system integrators who receive income by collecting together various ready-made solutions. Mail.ru intends to combine these two approaches: create the core of each product and then refine it for specific customers.

2020: TAdviser interview

In October 2020, Pavel Gontarev, Managing Director of VK Digital Technologies (formerly Mail.ru Digital Technologies), said in an interview with TAdviser that business is still poorly able to use the collected data, but clouds can help in this. Read more here.

2023: Managing Director of VK Tech

For September 2023 - Managing Director of VK Tech (formerly VK Digital Technologies).

Quotes

On national-level objectives:

SAP's expertise can be useful for national-level tasks. We see in Russia a huge potential for creating solutions that take into account local specifics and experience. For example, nowhere in the world is there such a scale of transportation by rail and car fleet.[2]

On import substitution in Russia:

Overly tough measures to promote import substitution in the field of information technology (IT) can boomerang Russian companies - they will be afraid to introduce foreign solutions, and they simply will not find Russian analogues. We can present some state-owned company whose Chief information officer needs to carry out a business project. On the one hand, he is told from all sides that it is necessary to use domestic products, and on the other hand, as a professional, he perfectly recognizes that there is no suitable domestic software. That is, if he takes a foreign decision, he can be punished, and if the domestic one, the project may fail. This means that he can again be punished.[3]

On the proposal of the Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov to open the source codes of SAP products in Russia:

The company is ready to cooperate with the ministry and considers the current situation to dictate new data protection requirements. We have already passed the certification of the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) for NetWeaver and ERP products, which are used by the Ministry of Defense, Rosneft. In the near future, the source codes for certification of our in-memory SAP Hana platform will be disclosed.[4]

Notes