The head of the Digital Economy commented on the effectiveness of competency centers

The effectiveness of industrial competence centers (ICC) and development competence centers (DCC) is obvious. Sergei Plugotarenko, general director of the Digital Economy ANO, told Vedomosti.

“Digital Economy” conducts systematic monitoring of the results of the activities of the ICC/CCR, and also has constant direct contact with business, Plugotarenko emphasized.

“In less than two years of work, serious results have been achieved. In particular, 216 projects were supported, which were selected among more than 560 companies from 17 sectors of the economy and social sphere. 13 particularly significant projects have already been implemented, and six more are planned to be completed by the end of this year,” he said.

However, Plugotarenko considers the most important merit of the ICC/CCR to be the fact that as a result of their work, after the departure of foreign vendors, domestic business processes and industrial work were not allowed to stop.

The CEO of Digital Economy recalled that working on large cross-industry IT solutions designed to replace world leaders in the software field requires a lot of resources, time and the ability to maintain the best IT teams, which small and medium-sized businesses cannot always afford. “At the same time, when developing, large companies subcontract representatives SME. At the same time, the implementation of large industry projects by representatives of SMEs is not always possible,” he said.

Plugotarenko emphasized that this is a living market that works according to its own rules and laws. “But our task is to attract attention to those developers whose services and competencies can complement the existing IT landscape and fill its gaps as efficiently and quickly as possible,” he said.

The main task of the ICC/CCR is to form an industry order for the development of industrial solutions around anchor customers, and then scale it to medium and small industry enterprises. In total, there are 33 ICCs in Russia, which include more than 300 leading industry companies and 700 experts; more than 250 development companies take part in the work of the centers.

The work of industrial centers is open to all interested industry representatives; for this purpose, demo days are held in the centers. Plugotarenko also focuses on state support for import substitution: projects whose development is critical for industries and cannot be implemented entirely at the expense of companies are allocated grants. The funds have already supported 26 such projects.

Previously, in a study by the Russoft Association, it was noted that almost half (48.2%) of Russian IT developers did not see the launch of the ICC and TsKR as having a real impact on the software industry, and another 17.7% did not feel significant support from them. The president of the association, Valentin Makarov, said that customers at ICC work with the largest suppliers, but do not know IT developers of small and medium-sized businesses. Therefore, customers automatically invite either their own insourcing IT companies or large IT partners.