Recently, software market players in Russia may have gotten the impression that the market has opened up to domestic products, and the import substitution course taken back in 2014 has finally really started working. But in practice, things are far from that simple.
And, oddly enough, this is being hindered by the consumers themselves, large companies that should be interested in the fastest possible automation of their activities and the transition to domestic software.
How do they do it?
We have been a Russian software manufacturer for 25 years and produce libraries for creating software products: elements of any business system responsible for creating documents from data sources. We do not develop products from scratch each time, and thanks to this, customers immediately receive ready-made report generation modules for their programs. To independently create what our company has been doing for 25 years, even remotely comparable in functionality, is years of development by a highly qualified team. And we solve not only business problems, but also problems of unavailability of software from foreign manufacturers
Suddenly, huge obstacles appear japan whatsapp resource - procedures for competitive procurement from contractors, numerous integrators who win tenders for the production of vital software for large customers, including government and quasi-government customers.
Usually they win tenders for large sums under No. 44-FZ and No. 223-FZ, and from time to time also taking into account the Order of the Ministry of Digital Development of Russia No. 715 (if it is simply a large business, then the tenders are also made similar to those held under these laws).
And more than once or twice we encounter a situation when a conventional integrator with a huge development budget approaches us with a desire to use our solutions. And we meet all technical specifications. The amount, the required functionality - everything suits everyone. With one small, almost imperceptible exception: "The volume of rights transferred to the customer."
The customer clearly states in the tender documentation: “All exclusive rights to the development are transferred in full.”
I want everyone to understand the scale of such a request. The only thing we can answer to this is: "Sorry, you won this competition, you looked at the requirements, you need to hand over the development in two months with all the rights - go and develop it yourself. This is a one-time story with the transfer of exclusive rights to your development, but we plan to continue working on the market in the future."
What if you create your own?
As already written above, it is realistic to develop something comparable to our developments in at least a year. It will be something absolutely disposable, not developed and not supported under the terms of the contract. Even if it is a good development, it will be buried, because it is transferred to a non-core customer.
Obviously, when transferring full rights, the customer also cannot count on quality support (firstly, the contractor will not be interested in supporting the code without continuation; secondly, it is irrational to allocate a separate team to support a “dead-end” development branch).
So, we come to the conclusion that almost any customer who demands the transfer of exclusive rights condemns their IT infrastructure not only to secondary status, but also to non-viability. How is it possible to develop enterprises and infrastructure in such circumstances?
It should be understood that any development is a set of ready-made solutions. There are no developments created from scratch. And, ideally, contractors (integrators) and customers should either adequately assess the scope of the requested rights, or create their own components from scratch and independently own exclusive rights to them. Cheers!
In fact, this is also a warning to other participants in the Russian IT market: colleagues, read your contracts, contact lawyers, otherwise you risk losing the rights to your products.