What does the future hold for the IT industry? RosNOU Rector Vladimir Zernov will tell you

The press conference of the RUSSOFT company, which was held the other day at the Rossiya Segodnya press center, was devoted to this issue. The speakers discussed the current state of affairs, trends and development opportunities in the coming years. If we generalize and summarize all the most important things said there, the following picture of the future will form.

There is every reason to say that we will continue to invest enormous amounts of money in the development of the industry, both from the state and from private investors.

According to expert forecasts, in the coming years, 80% of the domestic software market will be controlled by 4-6 large developers. But, despite further import substitution in this industry, work on foreign software will still continue – due to parallel imports.
Large Russian corporations, having lost foreign software solutions in the field of business management, are ready to invest billions of rubles in the creation and development of domestic systems (similar to SAP, for example) – just to protect themselves for the future and get rid of external dependence.
The return of foreign vendors who left in 2022, although unlikely (purely theoretically, in cases where sanctions are lifted), is still possible, but here they will have to fight with those who have already taken their place in the market, and this fight will be very fierce.
It is very good that the departure of foreign software manufacturers from our market stimulated the development of their own programs and systems (today, the Register of Russian Software contains 22,549 products, and their number will only increase). However, one can only guess when quantity will turn into quality.

The wealth of choice is wonderful, but so far import substitution boils down to the fact that we are exchanging one thing for another. And for real development and the “big leap forward” we need to offer and create something that no one else has. In some areas we are succeeding, but overall we are still lagging behind and constantly catching up.
The hardware issue still remains unresolved. The IT industry is very capital-intensive, its development requires enormous funds, but if you can write a program in a few months, then it will take years to build factories for the production of your own processors and microchips (at best, we will be able to produce our own on-line processor no earlier than 2027) .
For the new generation of users, interactivity, real-time interaction, availability of online services, automation of information search, processing of big data using neural networks and taking into account personal interests come first. Therefore, companies that ignore all this will inevitably lose the competition and leave the market.

By 2030, artificial intelligence (AI) will increase global GDP by $17 trillion, which is comparable to China's GDP. And a significant part will be the automation of routine operations. And in the future we can expect automation of all processes that can be automated.
If in the old days software was created by lone geniuses, now hundreds and thousands of people and companies are involved in this process. Therefore, in the future it is planned to develop and strengthen cooperation between various IT companies in terms of implementing joint projects to create new software products.
So far, in terms of digital transformation and the pace of development of the IT industry, we are ahead of many countries in the world (only 7% of people use online banking there, in our country – more than 30%). And we are unlikely to lose this leadership in the coming years.
The same can be said about the field of information security (IS): this is one of the areas in which the Russian Federation is really and significantly ahead of other countries.
The share of Russian companies interested in outsourcing internal information security has grown from 8% to 45% over 5 years. That is, there is a growing number of companies interested in identifying employees who engage in extraneous activities at work, steal money, leak confidential information, damage the company’s image on social networks, etc.)
In general, a trend of “uberization” is emerging in the IT sector: if previously many solutions and services were expensive and accessible only to rich people and companies, now the focus is on the average low-budget consumer.

Import substitution in terms of creating a large number of software solutions is gradually moving into the stage of unification and standardization. It is very good that not thirty-three, but only three priority operating systems have been approved: Astra Linux (Astra Group), Viola OS (BazAlt SPO) and Red OS (Red Soft). The next step is the unification of the program interface (API), without which it is impossible to talk about full compatibility of programs.
The fly in the ointment: in the coming years, there is no reason to claim that the acute shortage of IT specialists will be satisfied by the education sector: despite the fact that the country requires at least 700,000 personnel, universities are not at all striving to increase enrollment, and if they do so, then quite slowly. Perhaps here too we will have to rely on “guest workers” from IT, attracting programmers from India or China.

…In general, we can state: there is no turning back. Ahead is a competition between countries to see who can offer a faster and better service, program, system. And who will train more professional personnel – in the required quantity.