Column by Venera Petrova about the fragmentary habituation of the ICT industry to sanctions

Information about how the IT sector and the information and communication technology (ICT) industry as a whole is adapting to sanctions is fragmentary and contradictory. The authorities generate a certain amount of news about the progress of import substitution of foreign software, report on the introduced benefits, and from time to time give estimates of the proportion of IT people who have returned to Russia. All this creates the feeling that the process of adaptation to the sanctions is underway, and perhaps even successfully. In this regard, a joint study on the topic from the CMASF and the Internet Initiatives Development Fund is interesting – primarily because it contains excerpts from interviews with industry workers, as they say, “without embellishment”.

As you know, first of all, the expansion of sanctions has put the ICT business in front of the need to start adapting to restrictions on import supplies of microelectronics, to the difficulties with using foreign software, and to a surge in the emigration of specialists. In general, experts summarize that adaptation in these three areas is proceeding with varying degrees of success. So, it turned out that domestic equipment can replace imported equipment only in certain areas – as experts neatly express, cooperation with Russian manufacturers is limited due to insufficient quality and quantity of products.

The situation with foreign software is more diverse. Adaptation to restrictions goes both through the use of pirated versions and the purchase of licenses under gray schemes, and through the transition to Russian analogues (or to products of friendly countries) and the development of their own programs. In some organizations, at the same time, they simply turned off access to the network for foreign software and continued to work, without even considering Russian counterparts. A flight planning respondent said that after turning off most Western programs, the company realized that now everything would have to be calculated in Excel, and reduced the operations performed to the required minimum. Finally, in the labor market, the departure of IT developers (mainly from small teams that worked in the interests of foreign companies or in transnational groups) was combined with the retention of personnel in large Russian ICT companies and even the transfer of some specialists from closed divisions of foreign organizations to them, as well as with the emergence of a large number of graduates of online courses. As a result, now the opportunities that have appeared due to the release of workers are combined for employers with losses from restrictions and relocation of personnel.