Collaboration in IT: domestic developers have new opportunities for collaboration

Over the past year, the size of the IT market in Russia amounted to 1.6 trillion rubles, and it is growing, according to data from the company Cloud.ru

Senior Vice President, CTO, Head of the Technology Block of Sberbank Andrey Belevtsev spoke about this and other trends in the IT market during the SmartDev 2023 technology conference.

Experts note that 80% of the market is distributed among 500 companies in the industry, and the top 10 largest of them occupy only 20% of the market. Thus, there is no monopoly, there is serious competition. The question arises, can the IT community work as one team or every man for himself? Questions, technology innovations, key speakers gathered at a conference in Moscow on September 21.

During his speech, Andrey Belevtsev presented Sber’s latest technological solutions that may be useful to market participants. He presented to the public the GigaChat API, a software interface for accessing the GigaChat neural network model for business. Companies can use the service’s capabilities to create their own solutions and optimize processes.

“GigaChat has already been used by tens of thousands of people, generating almost five million requests. And every day 22% more users come. Using the service, users will have almost unlimited possibilities for working with text and images. In addition, the service is available in Telegram bot format, and developers and businesses will be able to use it through the cloud API,” Belevtsev added.

To simplify and speed up working with the service, the Sber team also introduced the GigaChain (SDK) – an adapted version of the LangChain library for the Russian language, which will allow developers to create their own advanced AI applications. The library standardizes typical cases of using various language models, such as working with chains, knowledge bases and documents, and also contains a set of ready-made queries (prompts) for solving business problems.

“Businesses have access to our artificial intelligence, which will allow many companies to reach a new level of technological development. The solution is a completely Russian development, provides high quality work in Russian, reliability and security of data stored on servers in Russia. We will continue to support the creation of specific projects based on open source for the development of the entire IT industry,” noted Andrey Belevtsev.

Another IT platform – GigaCode – is a tool for developing and autocompletion of program code. It is built on top of large language models and helps IT professionals make their development process more efficient. GigaCode is already used in Sberbank, and soon the platform will become available to external developers.

Another announcement from Sber was GitVerse, a web service for collaborative code development and hosting. It is planned to open in early 2024. On GitVerse, Russian developers and anyone else will be able to build a project, test it, deploy it on stands, and check the code.

In his speech, the head of Kaspersky Lab, Evgeniy Kaspersky, cited as an example of the necessary collaboration of IT specialists – the creation of their own software, namely an operating system, the code of which will allow us to talk about guaranteed data security.

“It’s not for me to say this, but I’m sure that antiviruses are not needed. It is necessary to create software that will prevent the appearance of viruses. The point of design safety is to ensure that the software that manages critical infrastructure is safe and secure by definition. To do this, you need to write a new operating system from scratch,” said Kaspersky and noted the importance of cooperation in this direction.

Let us remind you that the Sberbank SmartDev conference brought together leading engineers and developers on one site.

photo: Sber press service