Unique: Russian companies buy foreign software despite sanctions

Russian companies continue to buy foreign software, as there are no high-quality domestic counterparts. The Servernews portal writes about this, citing a study by JustFin.Tech for Business, a company specializing in software purchases and license payments.

Examining the payments and requests of their customers in the last six months, the experts found that during this period, Russians spent about 2 million dollars on foreign software, while companies spent an average of 500 thousand rubles. Russian companies have paid or will renew subscriptions for 30 types of services, including ThinkCell, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, GSuite, Clickmeeting, Jira. Services for data visualization and analytics business tasks Power BI and Tableau, as well as computer aided design systems (Autodesk) were the most in demand – about 65-70% of payments fell on such software.

In other cases, Russians paid for multifunctional programs needed by different types of businesses or even individuals, such as Zoom, Miro, Figma or Slack. According to JustFin.Tech COO, Russian companies can no longer refuse foreign software as many programs in Russia have no alternatives.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had banned Russian authorities from using foreign software to meet their critical infrastructure needs. He also ordered the development of analogues for software companies that stopped cooperation with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, including Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel.

They also wrote that due to the lack of foreign software for architects, Russian companies will not be able to build houses: Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Fusion 360, Dassault Systemes Solidworks. According to experts, it is necessary to spend billions of rubles to create its analogues.