The Russian government intends to make it more difficult for state customers to purchase foreign software and equipment, writes Kommersant with reference to the director of the "Center of Competence for Import Substitution in the field of ICT" Ilya Massukh.
The government should prepare a draft law closer to autumn, which will introduce a mandatory procedure for considering justifications for the impossibility of purchasing domestic solutions. They will be considered by the expert council under the government, and if the planned amount of the state contract exceeds 1 billion rubles, then a special commission for monitoring and analyzing public procurement in the field of software and electronics.
At the moment, state customers are so obliged to purchase software and equipment from special registers of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, but they often manage to easily justify the impossibility of purchasing domestic solutions, setting requirements that are obviously not applicable for Russian solutions. The draft law is intended to complicate this process.
The source notes that in different regions of the country, the current justifications are the same, up to spelling errors, and this may mean that foreign manufacturers and developers help state customers to draw up technical tasks in such a way that in the end the purchase of foreign solutions takes place without violating the law.
At the same time, Softline's deputy General director for work with national projects, Andrey Sholokhov, believes that even such "carbon copy" justifications have a real background, since a complete transition to domestic IT solutions is still objectively impossible. That is why, according to the expert, it will only complicate the life of state-owned companies that want to get foreign products for a short time.