Sberbank sent requests to electronics suppliers and integrators to purchase equipment from Chinese and American manufacturers

Sberbank sent electronics suppliers and integrators requests for the purchase of servers and data storage systems (DSS) from Chinese and American manufacturers for a total amount of more than $158 million. One of the largest Russian IT integrators, Softline, in turn, declared the import of large quantities of such equipment. Against the background of a possible restriction of parallel imports of foreign computer equipment, Russian companies are beginning to form stocks, market participants believe: similar domestic solutions are still not suitable for business in terms of quality and functionality.

Kommersant got acquainted with the address request for quotations from Sberbank for the purchase of IT equipment for a total of $40.5 million dated May 25. The bank announced seven lots for the purchase of 2.6 thousand servers. The request states that the results of the auction will be summed up on August 31. A Kommersant source participating in the competition says that more than twenty applications for the order have already been received. Sberbank did not answer “Kommersant”.

An interlocutor of Kommersant among Chinese equipment suppliers added that over the past few months, Sberbank has announced two more tenders for the purchase of products from specific manufacturers – Huawei servers for a total of $80 million and US Dell or NetApp storage systems for $38 million: “Perhaps such a volume of equipment the bank needs to enter the digital ruble. Another interlocutor of Kommersant in the electronics market confirmed that he received requests from Sberbank.

According to a source in one of the major server vendors, before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Sberbank mainly used Dell, Huawei and NetApp equipment: “The entire infrastructure of the bank runs on the programs and logic of equipment from these manufacturers, it is expensive and time consuming to remake everything for domestic solutions.”

The founder of the Oxygen data center, Pavel Kulakov, notes that the bank can update the equipment fleet: “What was purchased before the start of the military operation in Ukraine is already becoming obsolete. Productive and critical banking services always run on hardware no older than two or three years.”

Vitaly Mankevich, chairman of the Russian-Asian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RASPP), disagrees with this: “The mentioned amounts are quite small for a company like Sberbank, that is, we are hardly talking about a large-scale renovation.” In his opinion, the bank is trying to “test the behavior of equipment manufacturers.”

Today, explains Nikita Tsaplin, CEO of the Russian hosting provider RuVDS, using foreign equipment, “it is difficult to be sure that tomorrow its manufacturer will fulfill its warranty obligations, which means that scaling IT systems will become impossible.”

The task of the bank may also be to ensure warehouse stocks, since now the Russian government is considering blocking parallel imports of foreign computer equipment (see Kommersant of June 2), Pavel Kulakov clarifies: “Russian analogues of servers and storage systems are not always suitable for processing critical information, according to in a number of parameters they are still inferior to foreign ones. According to him, fintech, retail and online trading continue to need high-performance storage systems, “so we should expect similar tenders from other companies.”

“Kommersant” found in the unified register of certificates of conformity and declarations of conformity that over the past few months, a large IT integrator Softline (they did not respond to a request) has declared several dozen positions for equipment from Huawei, XFusion, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others.

Timofey Kornev