IT import substitution: installing Russian software is only half the job

On 9 September I spoke at the ICC Chemistry & Pharmaceuticals demo day during the Technology Congress at Patriot Expo. The talk was about virtualization in industry — not from vendor catalogues, but from plants already running Russian hypervisors in production. The main takeaway: Russian solutions already work and can replace foreign platforms. But migration is far harder than it looks at the product-selection stage. In practice you hit limits in network setup, security perimeters, legacy OS support and moving existing VMs. Sometimes it is cheaper and more reliable not to migrate a system, but to rebuild it. Staying on the old stack is risky too: support ends, vulnerabilities pile up, hardware and compatibility issues appear. That leaves an unpleasant fork: not migrating is risky; migrating is hard. So the approach is pragmatic: start before migration becomes an emergency; pilot on non-critical systems first; budget for rebuilding part of the infrastructure; do not decide from slides and datasheets alone; share real operating experience between enterprises. In industrial digitalization I keep seeing the same thing: real operations are far more interesting than a neat architecture diagram. Only in production does it become clear whether a technology is ready for industrial scale.