In just a few years, the Russian IT market has moved from supplying mainly individual products to building full-fledged ecosystems. This transformation was primarily due to a radical change in business needs, in particular, an increase in demand for ready-made complex products and turnkey solutions. In response, domestic vendors rebuilt existing business models, transformed product portfolios and began to offer customers not sets of individual products, but full-fledged digital ecosystems.
Ecosystems as a response to market demands
Of course, ecosystems began to form in the Russian IT market long before 2022. However, it was the departure of foreign vendors that gave this process a serious impetus. Faced with a number of costs, the business realized not only the need for reliable local vendor products, but also the need for an ecosystem approach to ensure business continuity. In other words, companies have begun to look for partners who can provide them with the most consistent stack of solutions – for example, from a virtualization platform to a backup system – as well as take responsibility for their compatibility, security and support. Under these conditions, the criteria for choosing products have also changed. If earlier companies evaluated the point superiority of a particular solution, then in the context of a new reality, in addition to functionality, the business began to take into account such aspects as the speed of deployment, the possibility of reducing TCO, the general level of reliability of the vendor and its expertise, the level of maturity of a particular ecosystem, the pace of development of the platform and a number of others.
Of course, domestic political conditions also played an important role. The public sector has set clear criteria for the development of the domestic IT market – technological sovereignty and active import substitution. In practice, this has led to the formation of a number of strong ecosystems built around one key component.
And, of course, the ecosystem approach turned out to be beneficial to the vendors themselves, allowing them to build long-term and predictable relationships with the client, to increase his loyalty to their products.
In other words, the ecosystem approach has become a point of intersection of interests of all parties involved in the process – it simultaneously solves a number of business problems, meets the goals of the state and meets the economic ambitions of the players in the technology industry.
Ecosystem for customer – risks and benefits
At first glance, it may seem that a high level of market ecosystem can carry a number of risks for end customers. For example, the threat of dependence on the supplier or uneven maturity of the product portfolio. Nevertheless, these risks should be perceived as new conditions for building and managing IT infrastructure. The key to managing them lies in changing priorities when choosing a technology partner.
First, let’s look at the most obvious scenario – linking to one vendor. In order to neutralize the possible consequences of a vendor lock, when choosing an ecosystem, the customer needs to evaluate not only what the vendor offers out of the box, but also how easily its complex of solutions allows integrating third-party products.
In practice, this can be assessed by information about ecosystem partners, the availability of compatibility certification programs, and product integration opportunities. For example, when making a choice in favor of the ISPsystem ecosystem, the customer reserves the opportunity to use not only the software for which there are already ready-made integrations, but also any third-party software.
The philosophy of openness is implemented in each of our products, in particular, in the platform for managing hybrid IT infrastructure and clouds Clouden. The solution not only provides ready-made integrations for heterogeneous environments – from our VMmanager and DCImanager platforms to solutions from other vendors such as VMware and OpenStack – but also allows to integrate independently any IT environments you need, including any virtualization platforms, third-party clouds and physical servers. With the capabilities of Clouden, the customer gets a single interface for managing the IT infrastructure, regardless of its complexity of the technology stack and its level of distribution.
The assessment of the level of openness of a particular ecosystem is especially relevant in light of the fact that many companies in the first wave of import substitution introduced solutions that optimally solved certain local problems, meeting the requirements “here and now,” but remained closed and limited business opportunities in terms of integration of third-party products. This naturally led to the emergence of a new task – “import substitution of import substitution,” which is why companies had to revise previously selected tools in favor of more flexible and compatible ones.
That is why today, in the second wave of import substitution, one of the key criteria for choosing a particular ecosystem is its integration potential – the presence of developed APIs, support for open standards and the vendor’s active work on compatibility. All this allows the enterprise not just to avoid repeated technological dependence, but also to gain a high level of strategic flexibility – the ability to build hybrid IT landscapes, adapt the infrastructure to changing requirements and freely combine the best available solutions. This approach directly contributes to the implementation of flexible tactics for building an IT infrastructure, which underlies the modern ecosystem model.
Thus, the ecosystem model allows to neutralize the risks associated with the level of maturity of the product portfolio of a particular vendor. The presence of an extensive catalog of certified solutions and the vendor’s use of open interaction interfaces provides the customer with room for maneuver and the ability to implement flexible tactics – use “native,” deeply integrated ecosystem components for critical services, and for a number of specific tasks, select the best-in-class third-party products from the registry of compatible ones or ensure their integration independently.
It is also necessary to understand that the modern ecosystem paradigm requires from the customer not only new assessment criteria, but also rethinking the role of the vendor. Now the business chooses not just a set of products, but a strategic partner, and this choice directly affects the operational efficiency and long-term sustainability of the business.
What does this give the customer?
The key economic driver of choice in favor of the ecosystem is to reduce transaction costs and total cost of ownership (TCO) through the principle of “one window.” Contrary to expectations, the transition often optimizes costs not at the cost of licenses, but by minimizing hidden costs. Working with a single vendor dramatically reduces the cost of complex integration of disparate components and eliminates the costs associated with eliminating cross-component failures.
The second important advantage is the acceleration of import substitution and digital transformation. In fact, existing ecosystems offer a platform approach with pre-integrated and tested components, so the customer can quickly deploy a workable environment using replicated industry solutions.
In addition, the introduction of ecosystem solutions makes it possible to build a single responsibility for risk and safety management, which is especially critical for the public sector and regulated industries.
The ecosystem allows to build an end-to-end model: all components are certified in a single bundle, the vendor centrally closes vulnerabilities for the entire stack in his area of responsibility, and end-to-end technical support allows to minimize downtime and operational risks, creating a predictable and secure environment.
The future is in open borders
Today’s stage of market development is largely a reaction to the problems associated with the introduction of “closed,” incompatible solutions during the first wave of import substitution. The next step is to move to ecosystems that combine deep internal integration with maximum openness. It is the introduction of such systems that will allow enterprises to build flexible hybrid environments, combining the best industry solutions without the risk of being in a new technological isolation.
The future lies not in closed, but in balanced platforms, where deep integration of solutions is combined with guarantees of their compatibility and compliance with open standards.
The consolidation of open standards by key vendors will create a single technological foundation for critical areas such as security and data exchange. This, in turn, will transfer the competition to the area that is most profitable and understandable to the end consumer – to the level of quality of services and user experience.
By Pavel Guralnik, CEO of ISPsystem