Sovereign clouds

The Russian cloud services market in monetary terms hardly takes up one percent of the total cloud revenues in the world. Nevertheless, periodically there are international players who declare their desire to compete for a place under the Russian sun. What to expect in 2019? Under the cut, the opinion of Konstantin Anisimov, CEO Rusonyx .

In 2019, the Dutch Leaseweb announced its desire to provide in Russia the services of public and private clouds, dedicated servers, collocation, information content networks (CDN) and information security. And this despite the presence of the largest international players (Alibaba, Huawei and IBM).

In 2018, the Russian cloud services market grew by 25% compared to 2017 and reached 68.4 billion rubles. According to various sources, the market size of IaaS (“infrastructure as a service”) ranged from 12 to 16 billion rubles. In 2019, indicators can be from 15 to 20 billion rubles. Despite the fact that the volume of the global IaaS market in 2018 amounted to about $ 30 billion. Of these, nearly half of the revenue comes from Amazon. Another 25% is occupied by the largest world players (Google, Microsoft, IBM and Alibaba). The remaining share falls on independent international players.

The future begins today

How promising is the cloud direction in Russian realities and how can state protectionism help or hinder it? For example, you can oblige state-owned companies to completely abandon imported software solutions and equipment. On the other hand, such restrictions will hinder competition and put state-owned companies in obviously unequal conditions with commercial entities. Today, especially in fintech, they are competing at the technology level. And if, for example, state-owned banks have to choose not the best technological solutions, but only those that have Russian registration, any competing commercial bank will only have to clap their hands and watch how miraculously the market share is won by itself.

According to iKS-Consultingthe Russian cloud services market in the coming years will grow by an average of 23% per year and by the end of 2022 may reach 155 billion rubles. Moreover, we not only import, but also export cloud services. The share of foreign customers in the revenues of domestic cloud providers is 5.1%, or 2.4 billion rubles, in the SaaS segment. Revenue in the Infrastructure as a Service segment (IaaS, servers, data warehouses, networks, cloud operating systems that customers use to deploy and launch their own software solutions) accounted for 2.2%, or 380 million rubles, last year for foreign customers.

Actually, we have two multidirectional concepts for the development of the Russian cloud services market. On the one hand, isolationism and a course towards full import substitution of external services, and on the other, an open market and ambitions to conquer the world. Which of the strategies in Russia has the greatest prospects? I do not want to think that only the first.
What are the reasons for supporters of dense "digital fences"? National security, protecting the domestic market from international expansion and supporting key local players. Everyone has the example of China with Alibaba Cloud. The state makes a lot of efforts to ensure that local guys remain in their country out of competition.

However, Chinese companies are not at all limited to internal ambitions, and their experience shows that this is the most optimal strategy. Today, Alibaba cloud is the third in the world. Moreover, the Chinese are full of ambitions to remove Amazon and Microsoft from the pedestal. In fact, we are seeing the emergence of the “Big Cloud Three.”

Russia in the clouds

What are the chances of Russia seriously and permanently appearing on the global cloud map? There are many talented programmers and companies in the country who can offer a competitive product. More recently, new players with serious ambitions, such as Rostelecom, Yandex and Mail.ru, with decent technological potential, have joined the cloud race. Moreover, I expect a real battle, of course, not between the clouds as such, but between ecosystems. And here, not so much the basic IaaS services will come to the fore, but new generations of cloud services - microservices, edge computing and serverless. After all, the basic IaaS service has become almost commodity, and only numerous additional cloud services will allow you to tightly bind the user to yourself. And the field of this future battle is the Internet of things, smart cities and smart ones,



What competitive advantages can Russian companies offer and do they have a prospect? Given that the Russian market, one of the few in the world that did not give up under the pressure of Google and Amazon, I think that there are chances. Perhaps one of the best price / quality ratios of our education in the world, our proximity to Western culture, the accumulated experience of doing business, including international (because 30 years ago this experience was not in principle), the experience of creating world-class IT products (AmoCRM, Bitrix24, Veeam, Acronis, Dodo, Tinkoff, Cognitive - there are not so few of them already) - all these are the advantages that can help us in global competition. And the recent agreement between Yandex and Hyundai Motors on cooperation in the field of unmanned cars only adds confidence.

Here the situation with the “landing” of global IT services in accordance with the requirements of national laws plays into the hands of Russian companies. National governments are not at all enthusiastic about the dominance of US services in their territories, and last year’s record $ 5 billion fine to Google in Europe is clear evidence of this. The European GDPR or the Russian "Law on the storage of personal data", for example, now impose fairly clear requirements on the place of storage of user data. This means that local services have certain preferences and even relatively small players will be able to compete with global companies due to their flexibility, ability to partnerships, adaptability and speed. The main thing is to set yourself such tasks,

What do I personally expect from the cloud services market in Russia and Europe in 2019?

The most basic and primary is that we will continue to consolidate the market. And already from this fact, in fact, two trends follow.

The first is technological. Consolidation will allow leading players to focus more on the development and implementation of new technologies in the clouds. In particular, my company is involved in the development of serverless computing technologies and I know that in 2019 we will see such projects in many different markets. The monopoly of the big three of Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the provision of serverless computing services will begin to crumble and in this, I hope, Russian players will also take part.

The second, and perhaps even more important, consolidation sets an obvious clear course for the client, because market leaders do it very well and, if you want to stay in the market, you must comply with its trends. A modern client needs not only technologically advanced cloud services, but also the quality of these services. Therefore, projects that are able to find a balance between their profitability and the deep interests of the customer have every chance of becoming successful. Personification, convenience and simplicity of the product - more and more play a key role. Cloud users want to understand what effect the service provides for his business, why he should do it and how to spend the least amount of time and money on it. The backyard of your product can be infinitely complex and technically advanced, but use should be as simple and inconspicuous as possible. Moreover, this trend even goes to “heavy” corporate services, where VMWare and other traditional guys ruled for a long time. Now they obviously have to make room. And this is good for the industry, and most importantly, for customers.