Business opportunities on the Russian information management market

The Russian situation at a glance

In general, every industrial or software company as well as every IT provider generates zillions of technical documents and thus experiences a need for information management tools and practices. Particularly, information management and technical communication are not buzzwords in Russia yet. You might be well-advised to use the terms “engineering docflow automation” or “development of technical documentation” to make your proposal clear.
Nonetheless the information management market does exist in Russia and you will find corporate customers willing to purchase products and services of this type (see Table 1).

Table 1 — Your potential direct and indirect customers in Russia

Note 1: Typical engineering companies have a software division, e.g. a company produces sensor elements and also provides a statistical library for analysis of data coming from sensors.

Note 2: Russian engineering companies (as well as European ones) tend to relocate manufacturing operations to other countries.

Figure 1 visualizes the relations between the various types of participants of the market. The best opportunities for European information management companies in Russia are shown in green ellipses.

Figure 1: Business opportunities in Russia for European information management companies

Expectations for localization quality

Engineering practice in Russia

Historically, Russia’s technical practices are based on German and Dutch engineering, manufacturing and shipbuilding practices. They were adopted in 17th century Russia with the modernization and westernization project of Peter the Great. They were thoroughly renewed during the second decade of the 20th century when the communist government faced the necessity to provide industrial infrastructure appropriate for the civil and military efforts of the Soviet Union.

In addition, a local school of engineering was formed to implement and modify foreign technologies. But Russians have not only adopted foreign ideas and solutions, they have also disseminated inventions to Europe and the USA. For example, Russian inventors thought up concepts such as three-phase electrical systems, the helicopter, and television. Soviet nuclear and space programs became known worldwide.

Examples of the Russian inventive spirit today include the software company Digital Zone based in Moscow, which is developing an original operating system called Phantom, as well as the company called Ascon which develops CAD software for mechanical plants which successfully rivals AutoDesk and SolidWorks.

To resume: Russian engineers expect flexible platforms or toolsets and don’t buy anything at ease.

Local standards

Russia has its own standards known as GOSTs (Government Standards), most of which are inherited form the Soviet Union. There are at least four wide series of standards concerning technical documentation (see Table 2). These standards provide detailed requirements for technical documentation including possible types of documents, document structure and document layout. Engineers and technical writers tend to follow the GOST standards. In projects for the government the application of the GOST standards is common practice.

Thus, if you are going to sell your authoring tool or CMS product in Russia, it’s a good idea to include a set of templates compatible with GOST. Support of GOST is an important competitive advantage in the Russian market.

Table 2 — GOST Standards for Technical Documentation

Russian language

People in Russia strongly prefer Russian User Interfaces and manuals written in their mother tongue. The second requirement for information management systems sold on the Russian market is support of Cyrillic fonts and correct treatment of text written in Russian. The most essential features are:

• Proper rendering of Cyrillic fonts when producing deliverables such as PDF, HTML, CHM, etc.
• Spellchecker program and dictionary for Russian spelling (with awareness for Russian concepts, e.g. one may type e instead of ё, but not vice-versa)
• Hyphenations
• Correct string sorting algorithms (such as the е/ё case)
• Full-text indexing and search engines shouldn’t be sensitive to word forms (word forms are just as numerous as irregular in Russian)
• MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Unix and Apple platforms require different Cyrillic character encodings (saying nothing about UTF8 and Unicode). We need authoring tools and CMS systems that can read and write any of them correctly.

The good news is that Russian programmers have already solved all of these problems. You may buy a license and integrate appropriate linguistic modules into your software as Microsoft and some others have done.

To resume, full-fledged support of Russian fonts, character sets, spelling and morphology is a very important competitive advantage in Russia (even more than the support of GOST).

Expectations for customer service and communication

Making contact

Be sure to address a certain person explicitly rather than writing a proposal starting with “Dear Sir or Madam”. Such letters might be considered as spam. To find an appropriate contact person in Russia you might want to check some available platforms (see Table 3).

Making contact with Russians is relatively uncomplicated: You may feel free to contact any person you are interested in directly via email, social network or mail. Also, you don’t have to perform any complex culture-specific “ritual dance” to establish relations. Yet, it is a good idea to focus your proposal on a specific project, service, or useful result rather than being too general.

Table 3 — Where to look fore a person for contact

Check your contact

To assure a company really exists there is a single Russian database of companies (legal entities). It is available at www.russianpartner.biz. This site provides essential information about companies: registration date, location, branch, current CEO, list of owners. It might also help to search social networks like LindedIn, Facebook or the ones listed in Table 3.

Be quick

Let your customer know the price of a product and/or total cost of a project as soon as possible. Fixed price bidding is much more suitable for most companies than time and material bidding. If you can’t calculate a price immediately, communicate a range.

In addition, you should be ready to perform a job haphazardly but very urgently. Later a customer may want you to improve the primary result or even re-do it all together.

Russians prefer to speak Russian

The most of important business information concerning Russia-based companies is written in Russian. It is not translated into English or any other language. Few Russian companies have an English version of their websites. Many Russian managers and engineers use LinkedIn and Facebook as well as the before mentioned Russian network sites. To penetrate the Russian market basic product or service information needs to be available in Russian.

Some culture-related tips

Don’t feel forced to build a personal relation with your Russian business partner. If he invites you to a bar or a party, feel free to say “yes” or “no”. There is no problem with saying “no, I’m busy today” or something similar. Russians don’t usually misinterpret “today” as “never”. If you say “yes”, it is not an implicit permission for a close relation. You may find that people differ depending on their business or industry.

When arriving in Russia feel free to ask for assistance in booking a hotel, getting a taxi, walking on a street at night, etc. Your business partner will help you with great pleasure.

Think very well before you complain about someone to his or her boss. This might destroy your relations with this person irreversibly, and further interactions will be hard and unpleasant.

Resume

Two groups of Russian companies might be specifically interesting to European information management businesses:

1) IT service providers. These types of companies can make good money in Russia. Treat these companies as your potential resellers or VAR partners. They may successfully implement information management projects for large industrial corporations and the government.

2) Software and engineering companies that consider European, Oriental and American markets more profitable than the Russian one. You might make money helping them to localize their products for different target markets. Also consider engineering companies that plan to manufacture their products (e.g. equipment) in foreign plants. They need to translate their technological documentation and adapt it to international industrial standards.

Understanding another country is a brain breaking process similar to debugging someone’s program code.

Links:

• Federal Agency of Technical Regulation and Metrology
• Embedded linguistic modules for Russian
  
• A directory of software companies and IT service providers in Russia
  
• A list of companies specialized in docflow
• The database of legal entities registered in Russia