Imported software ban is not a disaster: Expert talks about the impact of US sanctions on Russia

According to Alexander Khachiyan, international systems are most in demand in the areas of enterprise automation, industrial automation, mining and other similar sectors. In Russia, its own software in these areas was quite basic, and in industry, solutions from SAP, Oracle and other large foreign companies were mainly used.

“Therefore, there were no comparable solutions on the domestic market – it was impossible to quickly find a substitute, as significant development and adaptation efforts were required. This does not mean that all activity was stopped, but we had to invest a lot of additional resources both in import substitution and in upgrading to a new level,” Khachiyan said.

Another solution was collaboration between several of the most important government agencies related to construction, for example, the Ministry of Digital Development, Dom.RF and Rostec, which joined forces on the basis of a large common budget and attracted IT integrators to develop and import-substitute the necessary solutions.

Russian companies can still use some solutions if they have an office abroad. Khachiyan noted that we are talking, for example, about analytical solutions such as Google 360 ​​Analytics (which is no longer available for domestic companies).

Speaking about more widespread solutions, such as Notion, many domestic developers are already creating analogues of this service, for example Teamly, Younote. After the announcement of Notion’s withdrawal from Russia, many founders of similar projects reported spikes in registrations and an increase in requests, as well as the need to scale servers, the expert said.

A similar situation occurs with import substitution by Microsoft, which has its own operating systems and server rules, says the founder of AWG. Russian IT specialists are constantly looking for alternative solutions to work with them, and often buy licenses through international jurisdictions.

“This entails a certain risk and stress because it is impossible to find a replacement for this operating system in offices. Domestic developments of Linux-based operating systems are not yet able to conquer the mass market. For corporations, switching to them is possible, but for ordinary users it is still difficult,” Khachiyan added.

Microsoft solutions such as Power BI are also excellent analytical tools that are no longer available, but alternatives such as Yandex DataLens have emerged, the expert adds.

Khachiyan also mentioned Teleconference, which, in his opinion, has begun to catch up with Zoom in terms of quality. The Russian developer recently announced a global update of the engine and codecs, making its video communications more stable and lag-free.

Earlier, RB.RU reported on 10 services that announced they would leave Russia due to US sanctions that came into effect on September 12.