| There is enough space in the Western software market The first spring conference of independent programmers, ISDEF Spring 2005, took place in Moscow. The participants of the event were welcomed by the Ministry of Information and Communications. Perhaps the companies included in the non-profit partnership ISDEF (Independent Software Developers Forum) are the target audience of future Russian technology parks.
The domestic software business can be conditionally divided into three components, between which, however, there are no clear boundaries. The vanguard of the industry consists of several large world-famous companies: ABBYY, Kaspersky Lab, Dialog-Science, CBOSS, 1C and their peers. They develop and supply ready-made replicable software products, for which they own the copyright. Initially, they achieved commercial success in the domestic market, but are quite competitive in the foreign market. This is our regular programming army. Its attack on Western markets meets well-organized resistance and is achieved with great difficulty, but does not stop for a day. For a very obvious reason: a small share of the global software market can give a manufacturer more than dominance in the domestic market.
Companies specializing in offshore programming, also called outsourcing (which means custom-made software), form another specific part of the industry, united in the Russoft association. It is associated with hopes for Russia's successful competition with India, Ireland, Israel and other countries in the global offshore programming market. The result of an outsourcing company’s work is not always a finished software product; the order may be a fragment of someone else’s project. Copyright for the development belongs, as a rule, not to the developer, but to the customer. To continue the military analogy, offshore programming is most reminiscent of serving in a foreign legion.
Finally, ISDEF are companies (and individual developers) that produce ready-made software products, initially aimed at Western markets. This is the new wave IT industry. Many ISDEF members started their businesses just five to seven years ago. ISDEF was formed by a community of programmers, called shareware people in professional slang - from shareware (shareware software sold over the Internet). Shareware in a simplified form looks like this: debugged something useful, registered it on the seller’s website and, if your program was bought, received money. Examples of software products developed by ISDEF members include archivers, data protection and password recovery tools, games, etc. Buyers include, in particular, US government organizations, including the Pentagon and the FBI. The situation in this market could not be more favorable; to succeed you just need to be able to program better than your competitors do. Ours, as it turns out, can.
ISDEF is not a regular army, but it is not a mercenary force either. This is the Cossacks. The army may not be very well organized, but it is active and vigorous, successfully fighting on the borders of rich foreign markets.
Chairman of the Board of ISDEF (and director of Famatech, whose product for remote management of corporate computer networks is one of the best on the world market) Dmitry Kurashev talks about the important difference between our ISDEF and its American counterpart Shareware Industry Conference. In the States, the opportunities for creating an IT business are much better than here, and shareware is an activity that is more like a hobby, a club of interests, and not like entrepreneurship. The one who wants success in the market creates a company and makes it public, and the one who does not want this remains a sharer. For Russian programmers, the opposite is true. Shareware provides almost the only opportunity to start and develop your business. ISDEF was created to combine efforts in this direction.
At the autumn ISDEF 2004, representatives of the association estimated their total turnover with the words “no less than that of offshore companies,” calling 150-200 million dollars a year. This time, for some reason, they did not provide numbers, but they stated that the business was growing by more than 100% annually.
The conference participants greeted the greeting from the relevant ministry, signed by Deputy Minister of Information Technologies and Communications Dmitry Milovantsev, with joyful surprise. When asked about cooperation with the state, the director of the Alawar company, Alexander Lyskovsky, answers this way: we are interested in this, we will welcome officials, just as we welcome everyone who takes part in our work. And then, having come to his senses, he adds: just don’t think that we need budget money, “Electronic Russia” does not interest us at all. On the contrary, we are ready to make money in the West, to attract money to the country, thus helping our economy.
ISDEF members do not exclude the possibility that future technology parks will help the industry. According to Dmitry Kurashev, if there is a place where you can quickly assemble a team and start working, renting an office not at inflated Moscow prices, but at normal European prices, new software companies will emerge. The market allows the industry to grow even faster. Andrey ANNENKOV |
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