IT market: reality and perspective
Nowadays, there are two revealing trends on the IT market. First, any solution should work on mobile devices. Therefore, any area of mobile development becomes obligatory for any company specializing in all sorts of fields from game development to protection of corporative information. Specializing in mobile development is compulsory for each company regardless of its size and specialization on the market.
The second trend is import substitution. Working within the government contracts means that Russian developers have to create alternatives to foreign software that is currently used.
Large IT market players need to work within the state order considering that the most serious customers are companies where the state participates.
It is hard to predict what will be in demand five-ten years from now, when the market changes. However, you can always follow the trends that already exist.
It means that you can use breakthrough technologies, which have not been recognized on the wide market yet to define development of your business.
For instance, augmented reality (AR) was used in development of games and gadgets for games 5 years ago. Then new objects appeared with navigation based on the technology of AR, such as navigating through the Moscow Zoo or a virtual layout of the nuclear submarine for personnel training. At the moment, these projects are expensive to develop and maintain. However, there is already a tendency to reduce their cost and to increase production. Therefore, we can safely assume that products with AR elements will be included in our everyday life and will become popular.
The same thing is happening with biometric authentication. Biometrics used to be something unusual, but now you can see smartphones and ATMs using a similar technology. It can be assumed that biometric locks and things like this will be manufactured for ordinary city apartments very soon.
Obviously, the greatest value in IT industry is developers, that is, the people. In today's Russian reality, it is relevant not to attract employees, but rather to retain them. At present, there is large outflow of IT-specialists who choose to go abroad. Stellar software developers leave jobs and companies lose their valuable personnel.
At the same time, Russian companies actively compete on the foreign market. Nowadays, focus on the Pacific region is particularly relevant. Firstly, the region is rapidly developing. Secondly, high-tech production is concentrated there.
Another ‘positive’ difference of the IT-business gives it certain preferences. Unlike other types of business, the IT field can allow to bear the ballast for quite a long time. Certainly, outdated software requires some costs, most of all human resources, like technical support. However, outdated software still brings profit, even though not a lot of it. However, fortunately, the outdated programs do not occupy much space in a storage and do not deteriorate over the time and so on.
To sum up, the prospects are not bad for the domestic IT business. There is a demand on the domestic market and there are opportunities abroad. The main thing is to ‘trim the sails to the wind’ and meet the needs of the market.
