Regional cloud adoption peculiarities

If we have a look at the IDC annual report Russia Cloud Services Market 2011–2015 Forecast and 2010 Competitive Analysis, we’ll find out that Russain cloud services market produces $35M. It’s not much but the forecast is quite positive though - it shows a 100% growth every year and expects the market to reach $1,2B till 2015. If you have created any cloud service and are now thinking about emerging into booming markets, Russia and CIS countries should definitely be your first choice. But it is vital that you know some of the regional aspects and local quirks to strike oil. As you probably know Russia is rich with oil, and I suggest that you think how produce oil from the Russian Cloud. With my presentation I plan to share my experience in pushing a wide range of SaaS solutions to Russian and CIS Cloud markets. Common situation, main players, regional aspects - that’s what I want to discuss with you. Russian Cloud demand is quite different to the western trends. Cloud CRMs are out of the trends, Russians prefer to get their Unified Collaborations and Unified Communications from the cloud. The 2 fundamental traits that make Russian Cloud so different from the USA and European cloud markets are territorial and broadband factors. Another thing you should keep in mind when dealing with Russians is a high level of piracy in Russian businesses background. According to the BSA report the level of computer piracy in Russia reduced to 65 percent in the last year, but it is still high, especially in SOHO and SMB segments - the main target groups of SaaS. So when you try to explain all the advantages of cloud services to the business owner, and want to compare TCO between software and SaaS usage, you should keep in mind one simple thing: the cost of any software would be not more than the traffic spent to download this software free from torrent trackers. So you should focus your client on the other benefits of cloud services - the simplicity, and accessibility of cloud-based IT, and only then - economic benefits. This is one of the many examples of local market peculiarities. On the other hand Russian ISVs understand that SaaS is the piracy killing solution(cause it’s impossible to pirate cloud services) and begin to generate great number of nice SaaS solutions, interesting not only for local, but also for global markets. So venture entrepreneurs are also welcome to my session.

- by Anton Salov