On May 30, eXpress Services Director Igor Malyshev took part in the AM Live TV project “Russian Corporate Communications Platforms”. Together with his market colleagues, he discussed whether Russian solutions are ready to provide businesses with a reliable, secure and convenient alternative to such popular solutions as Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, Zoom and others in 2025.
Among the main conclusions reached by representatives of the Russian communications market:
- The Russian market for corporate communications systems is developing rapidly after the departure of Western vendors. Today, there are already mature Russian communications platforms capable of replacing Western solutions.
- The process of choosing and implementing a solution must be approached responsibly: preliminary diagnostics, carefully organized “pilots” and competent migration are critically important.
- Customers want to work with those vendors that create ecosystem solutions - with native integration, information security support and an open API.
- Security, stability, integration, usability are the key criteria that any IT director should be guided by.
When asked how the communications market landscape has changed and how mature corporate communications platforms have become today, Igor Malyshev answered as follows:
— All market players have been actively working for the last 2-3 years to level the technological gap between the functionality of domestic solutions and foreign analogues. There is currently no clear leader to follow, and our task is to take the best from various solutions and make our own. A clear example of how customers are increasingly choosing and testing domestic platforms is the growth of users of the eXpress Federation. If a year ago the growth in the number of users was about 20,000 per sprint (for us it is 2 weeks), now this figure reaches 40,000. Customer requirements have also changed: piloting is becoming a mandatory stage of selection, and “pilots” of several solutions can be carried out in parallel, and sometimes they ask about specific integrations.
Another topic of discussion was the question: how to choose a corporate platform for your business. Here Igor Malyshev shared his eXpress experience:
— It is important to understand that corporate communications include not only the standard exchange of information (by mail, in a messenger or via videoconferencing), but also the interaction of internal corporate tools in companies: document approval, global informing of employees, HR issues. All these tasks and processes can be combined in a single tool only with the help of technological integrations based on a superapp. We are heading into this story.
You can watch the full broadcast at the link.
