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December 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
Russia's Skolkovo proposes IT integrator for the public sector
An IT integrator is a company that integrates IT solutions into enterprises' existing business processes.
Currently, Russia's IT integration market is dominated by a dozen players who closely collaborate with foreign companies. That is increasingly seen as a problem and government agencies are becoming increasingly leery of these joint ventures least they turn out to be Trojan horses. There is no outright ban on Russian state agencies using foreign software, but things are headed in that direction.
However, the project is already running into problems. While Skolkovo would focused on the needs of Russia's government and the public sector, the tech hub has already asked for special treatment.
Russian business daily Vedomosti reported that Skolkovo pitched the idea of a tech integrator
in a letter to prime minister Dmitry Medvedev
who apparently thought it was promising and commissioned Skolkovo foundation's president Arkady Dvorkovich and deputy prime minister Maxim Akimov to develop the proposal in more detail.
Skolkovo is the natural manager of this sort of project. It was set up as a flagship business school that was also supposed to fund an investment incubator, increasingly it is being used to spearhead the state’s digitization drive. Operating with heavy government support, in recent years, Skolkovo has been the country's top tech hub. With over 1,900 start-ups in the ecosystem and 250 residents, Skolkovo produces more tech solutions than any other IT hub in the country.
However, start-ups often face the issue of getting
their solutions adopted by the corporate or public sector. A solution may be good by itself, but integrating it into the existing IT structure
of a company or organization may require extra resources, and neither the start-up nor customer may be able or willing to part with the extra cash needed to make it happen.
From this perspective, bridging start-ups and potential customers from the government sector looks like a promising project. Skolkovo says
its IT integrator wouldn't require significant investment at the initial stage and could be launched with a small team of professionals and just enough cash to support it.
Still, at this point, the project's specifics are unclear, including the role of the government. While the pitch sent to Medvedev refers to
the project as a "state-run IT integrator" and stipulates a 100% state ownership, Skolkovo itself said the integrator may not necessarily be fully owned by the government.
However, the project would request special preferences from the government, the specifics of which are yet to be figured out.
Meanwhile, companies in the Russian IT sector are worried that the arrival of a state or quasi-state integrator that could jeopardize the business of private IT integrators currently operating in the market.
Valentin Makarov, president of the Russoft association, was quoted by Vedomosti as saying that if a state integrator begins to compete
with the existing companies in a market where 60% to 70% of all contracts are either awarded
by government-controlled companies or state agencies anyway, the existing private companies will be forced out of business. In turn, if that happens, the segment will stop being competitive, and the quality of its products will decline.
At the same time import substitution, which the government has been pushing for in the last few