According to a Bloomberg report, Moscow will be replacing Microsoft programs on thousands of computers in the city with local software in response to the call of President Vladimir Putin to reduce Russia's dependence on technology coming from outside the country amid tensions with the United States and within Europe.
Moscow will initially be replacing the Exchange Server and Outlook programs of Microsoft on 6,000 machines with an e-mail tool that will be installed into the computers by state-owned Rostelecom PJSC, according to the city's head of information technology Artem Yermolaev. The city could then widen the deployment of the program, which was created by Russian firm New Cloud Technologies, into up to 600,000 more computers and servers.
Yermolaev added that Moscow may also consider replacing the Windows operating system and Office suite of software. However, there seems to be no concrete plans for such an undertaking.
Moscow has already replaced technology from Cisco Systems for surveillance cameras for software coming from local companies, said Yermolaev. Rossiya Segodnya, a state-run media company, and the regional government of Moscow has also made the switch from database systems powered by Oracle into open-code PostgreSQL programs that are supported by Russian programmers.
Putin has been calling for the move to steer away from foreign software and into homegrown ones for a while, primarily due to the decision of United States companies to shut down their services in Crimea after the Russian government decided to annex the peninsula a couple of years ago.
German Klimenko, the internet czar for Putin, is also seeking to raise the taxes on United States tech companies operating in the country in a bid to boost the competitiveness of Russian rivals including Yandex and Mail.ru Group.
According to Communications Minister Nikolay Nikiforov, the government is looking to spend the money of its taxpayers and state-owned companies mostly on local software. Beginning next year, government agencies in Russia, including the General Prosecutor's Office, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service and the Audit Chamber, will begin to tighten their grip around state institutions that do not switch to local software, Nikiforov added.
Nikiforov also said that Russian government agencies spend about $295 million annually on foreign software. The Ministry of Communications and Mass Media has prepared a list of almost 2,000 software products made in Russia that state-owned companies should be using instead of foreign products.
These moves will be cutting Microsoft and eventually other foreign tech companies from the lucrative software market in Russia, which held a value of $3 billion last year.
