The Central Bank will purchase Microsoft software for 3.3 billion rubles

The Bank of Russia intends to purchase software from the American corporation Microsoft in the amount of 3.3 billion rubles, the Vedomosti newspaper writes, citing materials published on the electronic trading platform.

According to the procurement materials, the regulator intends to purchase licenses for a period of five years (until the end of November 2021) for a number of products of the American company. Thus, the Central Bank is interested in 44,822 licenses for the cloud office product Office 365, about 6,000 licenses for Visio diagramming software and about 4,500 licenses for Project project management software. The software supplier will be the Lanit IT holding. According to some experts, over the past three years this is the largest purchase of Microsoft software among government agencies and state-owned companies.

Let us recall that from January 1, 2016, when purchasing software for government needs, the customer is obliged to give priority to Russian developments included in the Unified Register of Domestic Software. The exception is cases when domestic software with the necessary characteristics is not available in Russia. Formally, this requirement applies only to government agencies, but in July last year, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov sent a directive to government representatives on the boards of directors of state-owned companies that they should give preference to Russian software when purchasing software.

However, according to a representative of the regulator, the Bank of Russia is not subject to these requirements, since its procurement is regulated by the Civil Code, the law on the protection of competition and internal regulations on procurement procedures. At the same time, he noted that the Central Bank is dealing with issues of import substitution. Thus, the Bank has a special commission that analyzes various Russian products and technologies, including IT.

A source close to the Central Bank also noted that the purchase is not about new software, but about extending the licenses of previously purchased programs. In December last year, Rostelecom announced a similar purchase of perpetual licenses worth 1.26 billion rubles. Then the company noted that the purchase of perpetual licenses would provide the opportunity and time to consider domestic software as an analogue.