Russia’s IT market was generally limping along last year, growing just 3.9% between January and September 2012 – a record low rate that’s still above the global average.
Timur Farukshin, Director of Consulting at IDC Russia, in an exchange with CNews.ru last week, shared the IDC’s preliminary analytics for the period. Farukshin expressed confidence that adding 4th quarter data will keep the Russian IT sector’s overall 2012 performance results in the same ballpark as in recent years.
In monetary terms, however, the Russian IT market seemed to fare better, inching up a bit from 2011’s $30 billion and reaching yet another record high of $33 billion, Farukshin said.
The overall dip is an abrupt U-turn from the double-digit advancement trend the Russian IT market had shown in each of the previous years, except during crisis-crippled 2009, the analyst admitted. Nonetheless, what may now imply near-stagnation in Russia would look like relatively healthy progress for most other countries, he added.
For the global IT market, the final analysis of 2012 will probably reveal an almost negligible growth rate, about “30% less than Russia’s,” Farukshin said. The slowdown is reportedly attributable to an across-the-board slump in the economy along with curtailed IT spending.
In sharp contrast to the overall slack in the IT sector, Russia’s B2B ‘cloud’ service market could more than quadruple by 2016, according to Orange Business Services, a subsidiary of the French telecom company which offers telecom solutions in Russia.
Trends of the Russian cloud market – 2012-2016 (source: Orange Business Services, February 2013)
The firm’s analysts believe that this market could grow from 4.5 billion rubles (approximately $150 million) in 2012 to an estimated 19 billion ($630 million) in the SaaS segment and 20 billion ($670 million) in IaaS. These segments are expected to grow 50% and 40% per year, respectively.
Orange also expects the demand for PaaS and BPaaS ‘cloud’ solutions in Russia, once virtually untapped, to strengthen considerably between now and 2016.
