Usage of domestic IT technologies will be safer and cheaper — Timur Kulibayev
How are domestic information technologies developing in Kazakhstan? What challenges exist in IT-sphere? Chairman of the Presidium of the Atameken NCE RK Timur Kulibayev and the head of the Committee for Information and Communication Technologies Bolat Basheev have discussed these and other issues at the working meeting.
According to the Statistics Committee of the Ministry of National Economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the volume of the IT market in Kazakhstan in 2017 was about 685 billion tenge, including 365 billion tenge (53 per cent) is the share of the equipment segment, 279 billion tenge (41 per cent) - IT services and only 41 billion tenge (6 per cent) - licensed software.
Annual orders of 34 subordinate companies of state and quasi-state sectors exceed 96 billion tenge with a total ICT market volume of 320 billion tenge, that is, the principles of Yellow Pages Rule are violated. Moreover, more than 90 per cent of software products are poorly adapted to our country and are mostly imported, in particular, these are SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and 1C.
In addition, government information systems are developed by private companies with the help of contractors or subcontractors. As a result, the final IT product is very expensive for the state. Domestic IT companies can act not only as subcontractors, but also as major software developers.
According to Bolat Basheev, one of the national companies bought hardware complexes made in Russia, although it was offered domestic hardware complexes, which were superior in functionality and potential.
That is, today the issue of creating a list of domestic software and electronics products for further use for the purposes of import substitution in the state and quasi-state sectors is relevant.
According to the head of the Committee, Kazakhstani IT products are quite successfully used in socially significant areas. For example, in health care more than 90 per cent (700+) of medical institutions use the domestic product “Damumed”, in education — more than 90 per cent (100+) of higher education and more than 50 per cent (350+) of colleges use the product of Platonus. There is a domestic ERP-system "Favorite" for accounting, planning, monitoring and analyzing the activities of organizations, which is an alternative to 1C products in budgetary organizations. However, today the localization of domestic developments does not exceed 10–15 per cent of the entire market.
T&T Security, Kazakhstani company, has developed a new class of tLab, an antivirus system, and put it on the market. By this time, the Kazakhstani product has already had recognition among CIS experts. Another domestic company PC4u produces personal computers with a hardware system to protect information. The National Innovation Center has developed a domestic Inspector system for countering information leaks and a data protection system with the function of de-personalizing personal data and protecting cloud applications.
An important factor in the development of information technologies is the improvement of institutional conditions, including the development of human resources, ensuring the creation and maintenance of modern information technologies, and widespread education in the field of digital literacy.
Today, IT is a cross-cutting sector of the economy and is present in all spheres: the agro-industrial complex, subsoil use, manufacturing, education and medicine, housing and public utilities and others. But the expansion of infrastructure is of no small importance: the availability of the Internet, the speed of data transmission, increase in computing power.
Following the meeting, Timur Kulibayev paid special attention to supporting the localization and replacement of foreign IT products with competitive domestic ones. These measures will ensure information security of the country, reduce the costs of implementing various systems, and increase the competence of the local IT market for the subsequent export of domestic IT products.
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