How the Russian IT Industry Has Been Affected by the Exodus of Western Companies

Last year was a watershed for the Russian IT market: Western companies left our country, popular foreign resources were blocked, and content moderation on a number of Western platforms became openly biased. Vadim Glushchenko, Director of the Competence Center for Global IT Cooperation, said that all this has given a strong impetus to the creation and development of domestic IT products. 

To support this trend, the government has provided Russian developers with serious support: exemption from profit tax, grants for the development and implementation of systems, preferential mortgages for IT specialists, and much more. And the results of this policy have been self-justifying. New digital solutions that are worthy substitutes for foreign platforms and software are regularly released by domestic IT companies.

For example, a service called "Failure Monitoring" was launched to analyze the availability of Russian Internet resources and telecommunications services - an analog of the foreign Downdetector. The analog of the worldwide popular web server Nginx – Angie, was created. Domestic MTS Travel and Ostrovok do not look bad competing with Western Booking service. In addition, the Russian Ministry of Finance has already approved the list of participants in the experiment to launch the Russian analog of GitHub - a service for collective development of IT projects.

Gaming enthusiasts have not been left behind - Russia is in the process of development of its own game engine, Nau Engine. Also planned for this month is the launch of Ruvika, an alternative to Wikipedia. It is no secret that the well-known "Wikipedia" contains a lot of inaccurate information, which the moderators of the resource, unfortunately, are not in a hurry to remove, and for this reason the online encyclopedia is regularly fined in our country. It is worth noting that mobile operating systems (OS) are also actively developing.

For example, in early June, it was announced that Rostelecom is discussing with the Russian government the possibility of purchasing mobile devices based on the Aurora OS for civil servants over the next three years.  And a tablet based on its own operating system - KVADRA OS - was presented by the YADRO company at the end of May. In order to stimulate the development of domestic mobile OS, the RF Ministry of Finance is considering the possibility of unifying approaches to their development and creating common standards for applications.

Perhaps every user knows that analogs of Google, YouTube, Facebook (the owner company Meta is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia), Microsoft Office are successfully developed in Russia. We are talking about Yandex, RUTUBE, VK Video, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and MoyOffice.

And we have enough messengers, videoconferencing services, mobile application stores and other IT solutions of our own - there are already more than 16 thousand names in the register of domestic software.

On the ImportHub platform you can find a detailed selection of Russian analogues of popular foreign IT products.

It is no coincidence that Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin noted in February that Russian analogues can already replace about 85% of foreign programs. And if a system you need does not yet exist, it will be created at a later time. For example, Eurochem and Severstal, along with other industrial companies, plan to develop an automated process control system based on open-source code to replace IT solutions from Siemens and GE.

As we can see, the departure of foreign IT companies from Russia not only did not break the domestic IT industry, but also motivated our companies to concentrate and mobilize their intellectual and technological potential. I am sure that in the foreseeable future, there will be fewer and fewer niches available in our IT market, and the chances of those who made a rash decision to leave will be slim.