Contemporary Problems of Social Work Современные проблемы социальной работы academic journal

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REFERENCE TO ARTICLE
 
Danilov, A.A. (2016) State Electrical Industry of Russia and Its Development Potential, 
Contemporary Problems of Social Work. Vol. 2. No. 1 (5). P. 44–54. DOI: 10.17922/2412-
5466-2016-2-1-44-54 (International bibliographic description).

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VOLUME 2, No. 1, 2016
Kotova A.V.,
postgraduate student, Russian State Social University, 
Moscow.
E-mail: [e-mail]
 UDC 
330.354
 DOI: 
10.17922/2412-5466-2016-2-1-55-64
Systems Integration Industry: 
Information Technology Consulting Market Outlook 
in Modern Russia
Receiving date:
18.01.2016
Preprint date:
25.02.2016
Taking to print date:
28.03.2016
Annotation:  this study is intended to explore market situation in system integration industry and 
investigate highly priorities for knowledge growth of information technology consultants. For the corporate 
level, the study provides recommendations on strategic decisions for both consulting organizations and 
information technology users. In this article the trend of information technology consulting companies 
market and business challenges that consulting companies are facing right now is shown and also some 
opportunities for growth in Russian market were defined.
Key words: consulting, Information technology consulting, Systems integration, Information technology 
services, Application modernization.
1. Introduction
One of the fastest-growing segments of consulting has been information technology (IT) and 
system integration industry as part of information technology consulting (IT-consulting) [2]. 
This segment includes consultants focused on IT system migrations, integration of applications, 
IT systems installations and customization of box software products, IT systems support and 
testing, change management, IT strategy development, software design, acquisition and 
implementation and many other IT consulting products.
One of the biggest part of today’s largest IT consulting firms is outsourcing services [13]. 
Even big software companies in the past now became new successful consulting firms in present. 
Worldwide information technology consulting started its journey in 1990’s when software started 
to play a major role in companies’ productivity and new implementing new technology was 
essential for any business that wanted to be successful [18]. Since then information technology 
consulting companies developed a lot and now it’s almost impossible to find a large company that 
never used consulting services. As an example of Software Company transformation we can take 
the IBM Global Services unit of computer giant IBM [8]. It illustrates this trend, as services now 
bring in more revenues for IBM than computer hardware and software. A large portion of income is 
derived from outsourcing services. That is, once these IT services firms have determined a client’s 
needs during a consulting or analysis phase, they may deliver turnkey services that include actual 
day-to-day operation of the client’s computer department and/or other departments. Meanwhile, 
many companies outside of the computer hardware and software field have successfully blended 
consulting and outsourcing into their offerings, developing dependable additional revenue sources 
by offering a complete line of services to their clients.

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CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL WORK
In Russia information technology consulting services are demanded by organizations from 
various industries in Russian economy [20]. Due to difficult economic and political situation 
in Russia, consulting services became even more popular and valued than they were before.
2. Methodology
IT consulting companies need a clear understanding of business processes and pain points. 
To achieve this, they have to develop their consulting activities and establish closer relations 
with the lines of business, which act as decision-makers in more and more IT projects [3]. They 
also need to build an ecosystem of partners to be able to meet the new customer requirements 
in the best possible way.
The key results of the study is presented and discussed in this article. It delivers primary 
research data and analysis on:
•  Challenges that business faces in information technology related topics;
•  IT budget and spending priorities;
•  IT hot topics that include cloud services, digital transformation, big data, application 
modernization, security questions.
For this study more than 80 companies were interviewed, from different industries. 
Information about companies was received from personal interviews and from open sources 
including statistics information, open companies’ documents, information from analytical 
companies regarding consulting industry and other. The interviews were conducted with 
employees in IT department, including IT decision-makers and other executives who have 
responsibility on company’s IT infrastructure.
3. Results
The Russian economic environment has a restrictive impact on the IT investments of Russian 
companies, which are exposed to growing economic uncertainties, the strong RUB devaluation 
against EUR and USD, which represent the current major challenges for organizations from small 
to large sizes. Nevertheless, despite that, IT budgets have not been drastically declining, a small 
percentage of studied companies having seen a decrease of more than 15 percent in 2015 compared 
to the previous year. Many local companies have acknowledged that, through IT modernization, 
they can both achieve significant savings and improved operations, as well as new opportunities 
for business development. Therefore, they are less eager to diminish these effects by drastically 
reducing investments in new technologies, only when the situation strongly requires it.
Cost reduction and efficiency pressure in IT operations continue to be important concerns 
and the Russian companies are slowly starting to consider the externalization of some of their 
IT functions, even taking into account application management, which is encouraging for the 
IT-consulting companies. Furthermore, another option for the local companies is the move to 
the cloud, in which case they majorly prefer the in-house or hosted private clouds.
Top areas for higher IT spending are IT/cyber security, financial management, big data and 
cloud computing. However, cloud computing is less seen as a fresh topic, as, over the last few 
years, the companies have invested in such models.
Many companies do not yet view digitalization and improving end user experience as a main 
concern showing that they still focus on traditional IT operations and have not yet embraced the 
digital trend through IT. This task is yet solely managed by digital agencies and less involving 
the IT departments of the end users.
4. Discussion
There is no surprise that the economic factors and exchange rates have been major 
challenges for the Russian companies as 2014/15 has been a difficult period, with an economic 
downturn and a significant RUB devaluation against EUR and USD, as well as European and US 
economic sanctions against Russia which were not predictable events for the local companies. 
Figure 1 gives a brief understanding about the amount of challenges that companies are 
trying to deal with.

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