Oracle stops shipping software to Russian oil companies

Foreign software companies are starting to comply with the sectoral sanctions imposed by the United States against a number of Russian enterprises. As the newspaper Kommersant learned , the Oracle company, from January 29, 2018, ceased cooperation with the Russian enterprises included in the sanctions list (283 companies from Directive No. 4 of sectoral sanctions of September 12, 2014). Among them are the enterprises of Gazprom, Rosneft, LUKOIL and Surgutneftegaz. Sanctions are also applied to those structures in whose capital the share of a listed company is between 33% or it has the most voting rights.

From that date, Oracle refuses to conduct any transactions with these companies, including the renewal, modification and renewal of existing contracts.

Market participants said in a comment to Kommersant that many companies still retain a large dependence on foreign software. A complete ban on Oracle products "will cause great damage to the industry" because there are many Oracle solutions in this industry. For example, Oracle Primavera project management system or Oracle DBMS for SAP solutions works in almost all Russian oil companies.

Oracle warned about breaking the relationship in a January 12 letter.

Directive No. 4 was issued pursuant to US Presidential Decree No. 13662 of March 20, 2014, and is devoted to export controls with respect to the oil and gas industry of the Russian Federation, Kommersant reports. The US Treasury updated the directive on October 31, 2017 and extended sanctions to any projects, regardless of their location, if the company listed on the sanctions list based on Directive No. 4 has at least a 33% interest or the majority of voting rights.

Currently, Oracle is the largest software developer who joined the sanctions against Russian companies from the list. Microsoft has not yet announced such actions, although according to Reuters, at the end of 2017, Merlion and RRC, Russian distributors of Microsoft, introduced new restrictions on the sale of Microsoft software for more than 200 firms in Russia.

Sources of the Kommersant newspaper say that there is no panic on the market. Old contracts are respected without restrictions. And in extreme cases, the parties can always find a mutually beneficial option in order to circumvent the sanctions in one way or another: “Both the vendor, the distributors, and the resellers work in close contact in each sanction case. Often, it is possible to find options that satisfy all parties to the process, both legally and economically. ”

According to the 2017 Tadviser report , there is almost no import substitution in Russian federal state information systems: 38.6% of them work on Microsoft SQL Server, 25.4% on Oracle Database, and Russian DBMS are used only in 2.9% government systems.

---

When commenting on this material, please follow the rules Geektimes . Please refrain from insults and toxic behavior. Postmoderation works in the comments.