The Director of Development for the eXpress Corporate Communications and Mobility Platform answered Forbes' questions. The full text of the comment is available here.
Let's carefully study the text: The United States prohibits the provision of software and IT services to any person in Russia. To implement the ban, they issued a ruling prohibiting three points:
- provision of IT consulting and design services to any person in the Russian Federation – Any entity is specified, meaning it applies to both legal entities and individuals.
- IT support services and cloud services for enterprise management software – in the original text, the objects of this ban are listed as enterprises, meaning large businesses; individuals are not affected.
- Design and manufacturing software – in the manufacturing design sector, we know of large design solutions like AutoCAD, which were already subject to sanctions. The ban also apparently includes manufacturing software like Siemens, and obviously Oracle and SAP, which, again, were already banned long ago.
I don't see anything new in the new regulation. The restrictive measures will likely affect ordinary users to a lesser extent; they are primarily aimed at large and medium-sized businesses. In fact, the restrictions, which formally begin on September 12 of this year, are already in effect. We live with them and have finally learned to circumvent them: some companies have simply transformed themselves and moved away from using such software in favor of import substitution to some extent. Accordingly, there's nothing stopping them from completely abandoning foreign software and moving permanently in the coming months.
We can predict an increase in the speed of import substitution. Where businesses have already taken a closer look and tried, the regulation will actually only spur companies to switch to domestic software. And even if the service isn't "turned off with a button" and isn't managed entirely from the cloud, it's still possible to live with it for a while, just without updates. Where this isn't possible, I think they've already learned to circumvent the sanctions.
The workload on distributors may increase due to heightened business concerns, and there will be more questions for those who deal directly with Western vendors. Otherwise, I don't see any reason to panic. Most likely, the next round of sanctions will, so to speak, be added to the pile. We've all been living in this reality for a long time now.
