"Zircon Office"

The Accounting Chamber of the Russian Federation published Bulletin No. 1 with the results of several recent inspections. The results are usually disappointing. For example, the auditors came to the conclusion that the Russian Investment Fund of Information and Communication Technologies for 10 years of work could not realize its main goal - the development of the Russian industry of information and communication technologies. Since 2007, Rosinfokominvest has invested in only 1 IT project, and 14 were planned .

This is not the only problem in Russian IT. The Accounts Chamber acknowledged that the import substitution program , that is, replacing American Windows, Office and other programs with Russian software, is stalled . A report on the results of monitoring was published ( 26 pages, pdf ).

The monitoring was conducted in 2017–2018 with the following organizations:

• 80 main managers of budget funds from the federal government bodies, as well as government bodies of state extra-budgetary funds;
• public authorities of 85 subjects of the Russian Federation;
• 36 municipalities of the number of urban districts with a population of more than 500 thousand people.

According to the results, the whole picture was formed. Main monitoring results:

• The total volume of the office software market in Russia for federal executive bodies and state extra-budgetary funds is estimated at 1,609.9 thousand users.
  
• For the period 2017-2018 (as of October 30, 2018), the total costs of federal, regional and 36 municipal authorities for the purchase of software amounted to 33,016,209,400 rubles (33 billion rubles) in the amount of 33,702 tenders.
  
• Since 2016, amendments to No. 149-ФЗ “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” came into force, a registry of domestic software was created and restrictions were imposed on the purchase of software from foreign countries. It can be purchased only if "the software of the corresponding class is not in the Register or the software it contains does not meet the requirements of the state customer in terms of characteristics, which significantly reduces the effectiveness of its enforcement." Currently, the Registry contains information on 4786 software products grouped into 24 classes.

But government agencies do not seek to switch to a domestic product.


"My office"

"Excessive consumer properties"

The audit revealed that the legislation did not establish any restrictions on the characteristics of the software that do not allow purchasing software with excessive consumer properties , according to the monitoring of the Accounts Chamber: “The facts of excessive requirements for functionality, restrictions on competition and unfounded preferences for suppliers of foreign software are recorded. It should be noted that the purchase of software with excessive consumer properties without sufficient justification is a sign of inefficient spending of budget funds. ”

The Chamber noted the low efficiency of all regulatory features of import substitution, such as preferences of 15% (if the price of the Russian product is 100%, when calculating points in the tender, it is counted as 85%, and comes at a price of 100%) and other tricks.

Nothing helped. In the period 2017-2018, all federal executive bodies and extrabudgetary funds continued to operate foreign software:

More than 96% of federal executive bodies of the Russian Federation and state extra-budgetary funds use operating software not included in the Register as operating systems, 82% use foreign-made mail servers. Over 99% use a Microsoft or Oracle DBMS, as well as freely distributed DBMS software not included in the Registry (Red Hat, CentOS, Sybase SQL Anywhere, FreeBSD, etc.).

Even more serious situation is observed in regional information systems: server operating systems, directory services and basic services of Microsoft and other foreign manufacturers use about 94% of respondents, DBMS - 100%, foreign mail systems - 91%, even in information security systems foreign tools use 38 % of respondents.

The Accounting Chamber has identified 121 purchases with signs of violations related to restrictions on the acquisition of foreign software. The total amount of violations amounted to 3.3 billion rubles.

Centralized procurement

In order to avoid such abuses in the future, the government adopted Resolution No. 658 “On centralized procurement of office software, budget accounting software, and information security software,” according to which Q3. In 2018, the procurement of office software, information security programs and budget accounting for government agencies accountable to the government will be centralized .

So far, preparations are underway for centralized procurement, but in 2019, domestic developers are likely to receive large orders. For example, the Ministry of Communications promised in I quarter. 2019 install Russian antiviruses on 100% of computers. Then a centralized purchase of Russian office software will take place at once for all government agencies that are subordinate to the government.