The expert named the reasons for the slowdown in the growth of the Russian IT market

After several years of rapid growth, the Russian IT market has taken a pause for the first time: the pace of development has decreased, and the total revenue of the industry has decreased. As the market cools, companies are increasingly asking not what technologies to implement, but what effect the investments have already had. Sergey Taran, Managing Director of LANSOFT, told Izvestia on June 3 why businesses are abandoning chaotic purchases and switching to calculating the real effectiveness of IT projects.

According to him, in 2022-2024, Russian companies invested in digitalization in an emergency mode: the departure of Western vendors forced them to urgently replace familiar solutions with domestic analogues, purchase equipment and migrate infrastructure. The pace was set not by sound calculation, but by necessity. The denouement came quickly: after several years of double-digit growth, the IT market slowed down sharply, and the total revenue of companies in the industry declined for the first time in several years.

Taran noted that there are several reasons and they act simultaneously. The high key rate significantly increased the cost of borrowed funds and forced companies to postpone the launch of new projects. At the same time, government demand has cooled — the industry's largest customer has reduced purchases, especially in the equipment segment. Additionally, there is a shortage of personnel: the lack of specialists to implement and support projects remains a systemic problem. As a result, the market has moved from chaotic implementation to more meaningful resource management.

"The logic of decision-making has changed dramatically: business requires a clear justification for each IT project even before it starts. Previously, many people implemented solutions based on the principle of "we need to be digital." Today, business is asking a direct question — in how many months will the project pay off and what real benefits will it bring," the expert explained.

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Companies are increasingly considering the effectiveness of IT investments. Instead of purchasing "for growth", the business is moving to detailed financial models, taking into account not only the cost of implementation, but also the costs of support, employee training, integration and improvements. Both direct benefits are taken into account — cost reduction and saving of working time, as well as indirect effects.

According to Taran, financial services are now involved in coordinating IT budgets on a par with technical specialists, and specific performance indicators are required from projects. At the same time, companies are increasingly choosing solutions with payback within 6-12 months — automation of routine processes, analytics tools, chatbots and logistics optimization systems.

One of the main problems remains the so-called patchwork IT infrastructure — a set of disparate systems that are poorly integrated with each other. This leads to manual data processing, reporting errors, and increased support costs.

"The paradox is that a company can spend hundreds of millions on automation, and end up with a system that requires more manual labor due to the lack of integration between solutions," the expert noted.

In response to these challenges, the business relies on the unification of the IT landscape: it implements unified platforms, uses solutions with open APIs and integration tools that allow it to link existing systems without completely replacing them. In the coming years, the market will focus not on the number of implemented technologies, but on their real impact and ability to work as a single ecosystem, the expert concluded.

Anna Bekish, Director of Compensation and Benefits at T1 IT Holding, said on April 2 that wages remain a weighty argument when choosing an employer, but they have long ceased to be a decisive criterion in the IT industry. According to her, first of all, it is important for an employee to understand what he is working for. When a person sees the goals of the company and his department, knows why a particular task is set and what role he plays in the overall strategy, his involvement increases. Without this, even a promising and interesting project risks becoming a mechanical routine.