Treasury changes IBM equipment to Russian as part of a resource lease project for 2 billion rubles a year

As TAdviser discovered, in early December 2024, the Center for Ensuring the Activities of the Treasury of Russia announced a tender for the provision of services for the provision of computing and telecommunications resources for use for the Federal Treasury with an initial price of about 4 billion rubles^[1].

From the technical assignment published in the UIS "Procurement," it follows that the Federal Treasury needs to provide servers, data storage systems and switches for use - a total of 784 pieces of equipment.

The equipment will be located in the federal and reserve data centers of the Treasury. At the same time, the department plans to configure the specified equipment, as well as manage and operate it independently.

Services must be provided in several stages. The earliest one begins on January 30, 2025, and the latest one ends on November 30, 2026.

Notable in the procurement is the requirement that the equipment provided for use be present in the unified register of Russian radio-electronic products or the Eurasian register of industrial goods.

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Wirestock/Freepik

Thus, at the beginning of 2025, the Treasury will take a big step towards ensuring the integrated import independence of its information systems, thereby continuing to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of the budget system of the Russian Federation, including in the conditions of its preparation for working with the digital ruble, the department itself notes.

As explained by TAdviser in the Treasury, the core of the infrastructure of the largest information systems of the department, such as the Unified Information System, GIIS EB, GMP, GAS "Management," although with a large percentage of domestic solutions, is still the equipment of foreign vendors, in particular, IBM. At the same time, as you know, in 2022, many foreign companies left Russia and no longer sell and support their solutions here.

On the other hand, in Russia there are companies whose products in terms of quality, reliability and performance are already comparable to Western vendors. Moreover, manufacturers are ready to ensure not only the assembly of the required amount of equipment, but also to guarantee its performance throughout the entire life cycle. This allowed us to take a fresh look at our pace of import substitution of morally and physically outdated infrastructure. In order to update it one-time and completely switch critical infrastructure components to modern domestic solutions, the option of renting computing resources and placing them in the data centers of the Federal Treasury was chosen, TAdviser was told in the Federal Treasury.

The representative of the Federal Treasury clarified to TAdviser that the lease of domestic equipment following the purchase will allow the department to replace everything where IBM solutions are now applied.

The Treasury also calculated that the chosen approach would allow them not only to complete the import substitution project in a short time, but at the same time evenly distribute the financial burden at the entire stage of the equipment life cycle and not resort to one-time large capital costs typical of purchases of such a volume of "iron."

The representative of the department gave TAdviser data that at current prices the purchase of such equipment would require about 12.5 billion rubles of one-time costs and, starting from the 6th year, post-warranty service would cost about 350 million rubles a year. The Treasury does not have such funds.

And the cost of the service is about 2.2 billion rubles a year with a payback period of about 7 years, and it is comparable to the life cycle of the equipment. Thus, after 7 years, equipment replacement begins. And, if it were purchased again, then again it would take at least 12.5 billion rubles, while in the service model the entire update is under the service contract.

The Federal Treasury added that they increase the import independence of state information systems, strictly complying with presidential decrees No. 166 of 30.03.2022 "On measures to ensure the technological independence and security of the CII of the Russian Federation" and No. 474 "On national development goals of the Russian Federation for the period until 2030."

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