“Don’t Try to Seize the Unseizable”: How Russia Can Leverage Its Advantages to Become an IT Leader

Both are present. But instead of “anxiety,” I’d use the word concern.

In the latter, there’s tension, focus, and seriousness. Geopolitical events have reshaped Russia’s economy — and the IT sector especially. There is now a clear need for high-quality software across the full stack: from operating systems to CAD, BI, and ERP. And “product” now means not just code, but implementation, training, support, and services.

For companies that relied on foreign software, it’s a blow. But for those building their own products, this may become an opportunity — providing they act fast. I’d rather say: the bets are placed. Time will show who is able to take advantage of this moment — and who isn’t.

That’s the point! Yet still we need to differentiate two things.

Import substitution is about cost and economic control. This process is aimed to make conditions for Russian software developers to get fair profits of their work. Meantime eliminating technological dependence is a matter of national security.

A vivid — a bit of a cliché, but still telling — example is Adobe’s product line used in design and print production. It’s a huge market even within Russia, but replacing this software with domestic alternatives is not a goal of any real significance from a security standpoint.

Eliminating critical dependency — that is what drives development since a domestic product automatically gets advantages: a secured market share and opportunities for growth.

Unfortunately, in many cases, efforts to reduce technological dependence follow the path of adopting open-source solutions — but in reality, this simply swaps reliance on foreign vendors for a murkier and more unpredictable dependence on foreign open-source communities. The most striking examples are the market for domestic operating systems (most of which are clones of Linux) and database management systems (most of which are clones of Postgres).The control still isn’t fully ours.

The IT sector is itself a complex system in which both large players and small companies — all the way down to startups — have to coexist for the ecosystem to function properly. Major corporations anchor the ecosystem with core products and services. That work demands enormous resources and long time horizons that small companies simply cannot sustain — think of Yandex, VK, or the entire suite of 1C products for business automation. Smaller companies and startups, in turn, pursue experimental lines of work and create fundamentally new products and services. And across the board, every player — without exception — depends on talent, technologies, and, in most cases, investment.

One of the main tasks of regulation is to keep the ecosystem in balance over the long term. Similar problems, notably, exist in other sectors of the economy — for example, in the mix of big retail chains and small corner shops.

Discussions about promoting software products often overlook the fact that good software must not only be tested, but also proven in real-world use. No single company — however large — can do that on its own. From the outset, you need room for large-scale deployment, and that requires a big market. That sets up a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: to build a good product you need a market in which to road-test it, yet the product needs to be strong enough from day one to enter that market successfully.

It’s important to create mechanisms that allow small companies to get a foothold in the domestic market, so they can trial their solutions in real-world conditions. After that, they need strong, all-round support as they attempt to enter international markets — although under current geopolitical conditions this is extremely difficult. For many firms, this may not be a pressing priority for now, as domestic demand is already substantial.

In my view, government support for AI technologies is currently Russia’s top priority in terms of significance and attention. We can already observe — and reasonably predict — a surge of AI development across virtually every sphere of human activity. Its impact is likely to be felt most quickly in commercially significant sectors (finance, retail, industry) as well as in state-critical areas such as healthcare, science, and other fields.

There’s no fear around it. Organisations are simply weighing their readiness and whether adopting AI makes sense for them. The barriers will differ depending on how extensively and in what ways AI is deployed — particularly when it comes to securing the right talent and technological capacity.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that every technology goes through a period of rapid expansion, after which the hype fades and the technology finds its proper niche. That was the case with “big data” and with “blockchain.”

As for AI technologies, I see them evolving — but in ways that require the creation of new organisational and industrial frameworks, or, to borrow from Marxism, an entirely new socio-economic formation.

Everything ultimately depends on human resources — scientific and technical — technological capacity, from software to computing hardware, and the scale at which these technologies are used in practice. They outscale us by sheer numbers, but in quality we can hold our own.

It’s easier to describe the technologies we aspire to. Obviously, that means delivering tangible successes under the national AI development programme, earning recognition as a contributor to the quantum revolution, and taking our place among the real architects of a new technological IT order in the emerging cyber-era of society.

I would also add that we want Russia to stand as a technologically independent country, with its own critically important software and technologies at its core.

One needs to take a clear-eyed view and recognize that total dominance is impossible — and that there’s no need to try and do everything at once. Russia can join the ranks of the leaders by leaning into its strengths: effectively building on and developing its engineering tradition and specialist training system, and intelligently absorbing and applying global advances in IT theory and practice. This holds true across the full spectrum of participants and players in the domestic IT market and industry.

Notably, since 1990 RELEX has had its own in-house training school for data-processing technologies, database products, and IT specialists. Over the years, we have trained hundreds of highly qualified programmers who now work at many world-class IT companies.

First, there are mandatory and necessary conditions for ensuring — and enabling — meaningful growth. These include building — and steadily advancing — a modern, effective IT-industry infrastructure; building and organically expanding an open, scalable ecosystem closely integrated with the world’s leading high-tech centers; and taking a full part in shaping and adopting a new, transformative ethic for global IT practice.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, the standout strength of Russia’s IT sector is its system for training specialists. IT development is a continuous process, and it’s impossible to predict with any precision what will happen in three to five years — let alone in a decade. But one thing is constant: the most important and decisive resource for progress will always be a high-quality IT talent pipeline.

RELEX has long been — and will remain — one of Russia’s researchers and developers of robust solutions for digital data storage and management. For many years, we have been creating reliable and competitive software that is used across a broad sweep of sectors in the domestic economy.

One of our flagship products is the LINTER database management system, a solution proven over decades and known for its stability and strong performance. LINTER is used in Russia and internationally.

Developing database-management solutions is a continuous process aligned with the current directions and achievements of the global IT industry. Since 2016, our team has been working on a fundamentally new DBMS called SOKOL. The project aims to deliver a next-generation product with excellent performance characteristics and built to handle massive data volumes, even at peak load. In early 2025, the new DBMS was launched and has already earned positive feedback from early users.

Beyond successfully advancing our DBMS products, we actively participate in major projects developing specialised software across a broad range of industries. Our clients include industrial enterprises, healthcare providers, construction companies, and businesses in the restaurant and hospitality sectors. It is this long-standing experience that enables us to offer our clients genuinely effective and reliable solutions tailored to their specific tasks and requirements.