Russia's Putin IT spend in reverse gear, fast When the first dotcom bubble popped, the likes of EMC, Sun and Oracle didn't panic that the days of easy greenfield sales were over because the then-burgeoning economies of eastern Europe gave them new greenfields in which to romp. Russia, in particular, modernised quickly and became a decent-sized market for enterprise IT. …
It is to some extent switching to internal and Chinese suppliers and solutions which were cheaper in the first place.
Prior to the sanctions regime the western equipment could and did beat them on features and spec. Sanctions and planning for their potential escalation has changed the landscape. The industry there is expecting tit-for-tat responses which are explicitly designed to give local industries a kick. This was done for agriculture last year (though the effect was more to shift imports to Asia rather than helping indigenous agriculture). If there will be further sanctions IT will be one of the likely top subjects for counter-sanctions. As a result you get an environment where nobody in his sane mind will buy Eu or USA equipment as the parts and support for it may fall under an embargo or counter-sanctions or both in a few months.
News this morning is that the new UK farm subsidy payment system has been canned even though farmers were forced to use it, as it doesnt work. A mere £154million has been spent on it, but hey, that's technology isnt it?. That's the proper way to deliver givernment IT systems. Why can't the Russians understand this?
Its nowt that - £154 million is peanuts.
Potential example:
(Previous) UK guvmint spent (that is gave) UK power generators £630 million to burn trees/wood in power stations. Motivation: UK green credentials were a bit tardy, burning wood is carbon neutral so massages UK carbon emissions (ommissions?) a little.
Consequences: £630 hot millions in UK buy wood campaign sorta puts up the price of wood dinnit? Now you can't buy wood easily in UK as most of it is earmarked for burning in electricity generating power stations.
What remains of UK coal industry has had its order books slashed because big customers are burning wood/trees and not coal. Miners are uneasy again?
Businesses dependent on wood other than for burning it are facing increases in cost of product that makes them noncompetitive in todays market.
Decisions taken in previous guvmint have taken a while to kick in but kick in they did.
Or so I am lead to believe.
The wood being burned in UK power stations is almost entirely sourced from canadian old-growth forests (using oil), chipped in canada (using oil), transported across canada and the atlantic to drax (using oil).
The end result is that the supposedly "carbon neutral" woodburning at Drax is a spectacular greenwash event with virtually no reduction in overall CO2 generation.
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