Archive of publications
2026
27.01.2026 ComNews Cloud BI, ERP, CRM, and Accounting Systems: Small Volumes and Sluggish Dynamics, but Big Prospects Cloud BI, ERP, CRM, and accounting systems in Russia and the CIS remain a “sleeping giant”: today this is a small market with weak momentum, but with enormous unrealized potential capable of transforming business economics. N4A’s research shows that conventional estimates of the SaaS market actually mask a very narrow segment of truly functionally complex solutions that have a real impact on the efficiency of companies’ business processes. N4A deliberately narrowed the focus of the study and moved beyond aggregate SaaS figures, which are often a byproduct of provider rankings and do not reflect the structure of consumption by service type. N4A singled out the most functionally complex software—BI, ERP, CRM, and mass-market accounting systems—that manage resources, planning, and execution and are capable of delivering measurable economic effects rather than just “another subscription.” Only public SaaS models were included in the analysis. Highly specialized, poorly scalable solutions and numerous “private clouds,” which in essence remain on-prem infrastructure with a marketing label, were excluded. This approach made it possible to quantify precisely the segment that can potentially scale economic impact for B2B customers quickly, rather than merely increasing their costs. Big Numbers: Scale and Stagnation According to N4A estimates, in 2025 the total market size for BI, ERP, CRM, and mass-market accounting systems delivered via the public SaaS model in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan amounts to only about RUB 17.5 billion and roughly 340,000 unique corporate users that regularly use at least one of these service types. These figures stand in sharp contrast to common SaaS market estimates when considering only those solutions that can potentially deliver significant economic value and truly scale through the public cloud model. For a long time, the market was “treading water.” According to N4A calculations, in 2024 it merely recovered the decline of 2022–2023, with confident growth appearing only in 2025—primarily driven by accelerated adoption of accounting systems rather than complex BI or ERP solutions. Over the 2021–2025 period, the market grew in monetary terms at a CAGR of about 8%, i.e., more slowly than the price growth of SaaS services themselves, which essentially indicates stagnation in real consumption volumes.
26.01.2026 ComNews WAF and Anti-DDoS in Russia: Sustainable Growth, Strong Positions of Russian Developers, Clear Prospects According to preliminary estimates by N4A, in 2025 consumption of WAF and Anti-DDoS products and services in Russia grew by 19% year on year and reached RUB 11 billion. This is almost five times smaller than the largest segment of the network security market—perimeter protection solutions—which reached RUB 47 billion in 2025. Overall, this 1:5 ratio corresponds to the distribution of stored and processed corporate data between user devices within local perimeters and data centers (both public and private). For many years, Russian developers have held strong positions in the WAF/Anti-DDoS segment, which is why—unlike the perimeter security segment—the scope for import substitution here has been limited. Importantly, the leading positions of Russian vendors were not driven by regulatory preferences, and some of them have been successful in international markets as well. Notably, in this segment both global players and leading Russian vendors predominantly rely on a cloud delivery model and a subscription-based monetization model. As with any cloud service, the key advantages are elasticity and pay-as-you-go pricing based on actual consumption. As a result, unlike perimeter protection solutions, the size of the WAF/Anti-DDoS segment is formed mainly by recurring revenue streams. This benefits customers—whose online applications typically experience steadily growing loads—and also enhances the business stability of providers. According to the N4A forecast, growth rates in this segment are expected to accelerate—from +19% in 2025 to a +25% CAGR in the 2026–2028 period. Both extensive and intensive factors are working in favor of this acceleration. Extensive growth is driven by an increasing number of cloud applications and rising workloads on them. The main driver here is the sustained growth of so-called “tech” businesses—fintech and e-commerce. Intensive growth comes from rising demand for protection due to the increasing sophistication of attacks on online resources. Traditional Anti-DDoS solutions operating at the L4 level have ceased to be sufficient, forcing Anti-DDoS providers to move up to the application logic level (L7). As a result, Anti-DDoS and WAF have effectively merged into a single service for protecting online applications. As digital ecosystems continue to take shape, API protection functionality—so-called WAAF—is also actively developing, and many providers are adding cloud workload protection features to their standard WAF/Anti-DDoS offerings. Overall, we estimate the growth potential of the Anti-DDoS/WAF segment in Russia at RUB 7 billion in additional annual revenue, with most of this potential likely to be monetized in the coming years with minimal enhancements to existing product and service offerings.
2025
August 2025, Connect-WIT Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English:
CONNECT. World of Information Technologies, Septembver 2025 "Ai-powered business automation" — goals and design principles.
28.07.2025 ComNews The rapid growth in the use of WFM in Russia has not yet led to significant economic results. During the period from 2021 to 2023, the Russian WFM market experienced explosive growth, as a result of which the number of workplaces managed by WFM increased sixfold—from 100,000 in 2021 to almost 600,000 by the end of 2023. However, in 2024 the market’s growth rate slowed sharply.
15.12.2025 ComNews The period of rapid growth in the NGFW market has come to an end. Alexander Gerasimov, co-founder of the analytics company N4A, believes that the NGFW market has completed its active growth phase: growth slowed from 30% in 2024 to 19% in 2025. For further development, market participants need to change their strategies. Most market players agreed with these conclusions.
2022
April 2022, Connect-WIT magazine Edge computing: the concept, architecture, economic outcome Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: Edge computing: the concept, architecture, economic outcome
February 2022, Connect-WIT magazine Autonomous networks’ self-management. Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia Abstracts in English: The publication describes autonomous networks concept and represents the results of quantitative assessment of economic outcome due to shift from low levels of automation (0-1) to fully autonomous NMS/OSS/BSS processes (4-5 levels of autonomy). Then the author describes the architecture of fully autonomous management system and principles of their autonomous interaction
September 2022, Connect-WIT AI-powered automation: goals and principles Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia Abstracts in English: The article describes a possible use of adaptive AI-powered automation for complex value-chain rebalancing, applying principles similar to cross-domain orchestration in next-generation telecommunications networks. As an example, it discusses the use of dynamic pricing for labor resources to address employers’ short-term peak demand for mass workforce.
2021
February 2021, Connect-WIT Win-win digitalization will radically transform cities and their economics, will create 13 million of new jobs outside major Russian cities Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: As any instrument, digitalization of economics may be used both to improve quality of living of all people (win-win game), or to improve living of limited social groups at the expense of other groups (win-lose game). The author states that in long term only win-win digitalization is sustainable, while win-lose one may generate large outcome for limited social groups in short term, but in long term will turn into lose-lose game. Then the author describes the basic principles of win-win digital economy, i.e. principles of interaction between subjects of economic activity, and represents results of quantitative assessment of economic outcome from win-win digitalization, taking Russian economy as an example.
October 2021, Einpresswire (www.einnews.com) Global SCADA market has reached $85 bln. in 2020 with 5% YoY growth and will reach $173 bln. in 2025
October 2021, Einpresswire (www.einnews.com) Gross economic outcome from digitalization of key verticals of US economy may reach $506 bln. by 2030
November 2021, Einpresswire (www.einnews.com) Autonomous intelligent networks may earn $900B annual revenue to the telecom market
November 2021, Einpresswire (www.einnews.com) Global Private LTE & 5G Market forecast 2021-2025: the market is expected to reach $2.8 bln. revenue by 2025
November 2021, Einpresswire (www.einnews.com) The global cybersecurity market is expected to exceed $48 bln by 2025, driven by SECaaS products
2020
December 2020, Connect-WIT Digital transformation of businesses and verticals: goals, criteria, models, use-cases Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: The author proposes original definition of digital economy and process of its digitalization, and offers criteria for quantitative assessment of digitalization levels for specific verticals and economic outcomes related to each level of digitalization. In conclusion, the author give his answer to the key question – why real digitalization of businesses and verticals is so slow and what shall be done to accelerate it.
December 2020, Connect-WIT magazine Networks for distributed cloud computing Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: According to Cisco, datacenter-associated traffic comprises almost 95% of all traffic in wide area networks (WANs), and almost half of it is traffic between datacenters, which is not directly related to end-user devices. This traffic is generated by wide range of distributed applications, located in distributed clouds. These applications impose quite different requirements (QoS) on networks – some of them need high throughput (network capacity), but do not sensitive to latency, others are latency sensitive, but to not generate much traffic. Furthermore, inter-datacenter traffic is characterized by much sharper peaks of load that that of users’ traffic. “Best effort” networks offering fixed “one-fits-all” connectivity services cannot cope with this diversity and dynamics. In order to attract inter-datacenter traffic, telcos have to launch next generation services – on-demand network capacity provisioning with determined QoS, not “best effort” (stochastic) QoS. Such services called Network as a Service. Then the author describes the key role of ability to dynamically balance workload between locations of distributed cloud, which calls for inter-domain orchestration between datacenters, including edge ones, and networks used to provide connectivity between them. The author propose long-distance balancing experiment between datacenters located 3,300 km from each other in order to prove technical ability of cross-domain orchestrator prototype to dynamically move workload from overloaded datacenters to idle ones in other time zones.
2018
February 2018, Connect-WIT magazine Digital production of digital products for digital economy Connect-WIT magazine, the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: The author states that the concept of cyber-physical product-services systems (CP-PSS) shall be considered as the basis concept for digital economy. Therefore, the principles of CPPS autonomous interaction is the key differentiation between “traditional” and digital economies. Cloud computing is the specific use-case for CP-PSS, so development of principles of interaction between clouds, in particular for hybrid/multicloud use case, have more broader sense if considering them as universal principles of any kind of CP-PSS interaction.
October 2018, Connect-WIT magazine Machine learning as the key element for adaptive self-management of complex systems. Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: The author considers machine learning technique as the key technological element necessary to achieve self-adaptability of integrated digital models, needed to provide dynamically adaptive planning throughout complicated value chains. The author emphasize importance of machine (IoT) data as major source of data and cloud model of deployment of integrated digital models
June 2018, Connect-WIT magazine Global experience in SDN networks deployment Connect-WIT magazine (https://www.connect-wit.ru/), the leading professional media in ICT field in Russia. Abstracts in English: The author provide analysis on reasons why there is such grate difference in SDN adoption by hyperscale cloud providers and traditional telcos. Google and other hyperscalers use SDN as primary technology for management of their private global networks of datacenters (Google B4, for instance), while traditional telcos, including the most advances ones, such as AT&T, are still in the early stage of SDN implementation on their networks. The author predicts that quick rise of hybrid and multicloud adoption by enterprises will force traditional telcos to accelerate the pace of introduction of SDN and NFV/MANO into their NMS/OSS/BSS processes.
December 2018, Agrobusiness magazine Cloud services for digital transformation of agriculture “Agrobusiness” magazine (https://agbz.ru/), the leading Russian professional media in agriculture field. Abstracts in English: End to end digitalization, based on stochastic planning with use of systems of digital models throughout the value chain “from field to customer”, enables radical transformation of production, logistics and sales of agriculture products, and thus multiple reduсtion of per-unite costs and retail prices, improvement of profitability of agriculture business and quality of agriculture goods. Forming of complicated ecosystem of cloud-based IoT platforms, accumulation of large arrays of M2M data for long historical period, and readiness of agriculture business for its transformation are the key factors of success.