A phased transition of officials and employees of state companies to use the Russian mobile operating system Sailfish "Rostelecom" will require more than 160 billion rubles. It wants to transfer almost 8 million users until the end of 2021. The necessary minimum of applications for using Sailfish on the work phone is already there, experts say.
By 2021, 7.9 million employees of state agencies, budgetary institutions and companies with state participation should switch to smartphones with Sailfish OS from Rostelecom, a federal official, familiar with the plans, told Kommersant. Such smart phones will also be recommended to local authorities. It is assumed that the tariff for "providing a comprehensive service" using smartphones on the domestic OS will be 13.1 thousand rubles. per year per person.
In addition, according to Kommersant, the Finance Ministry presented a justification for the need to allocate an additional 2.3 billion rubles from the federal budget to complete the creation of the OS.
In total, a phased transfer of officials to Sailfish before the end of 2021 is planned to spend about 160.2 billion rubles. Of these, 71.3 billion rubles. will allocate from the federal budget, 78.2 billion rubles of state-owned company and another 10.7 billion rubles from local budgets.
The Ministry of Finance re-addressed the questions of Kommersant to the Ministry of Communications, whose representative declined to comment, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, where they did not respond to the request within seven days. In "Rostelecom" could not submit a comment, referring to the employee's vacation. The general manager of the developer Sailfish "Open mobile platform" Pavel Eiges also did not respond to the request of "Kommersant".
The transition of state agencies, budget institutions and federal authorities to smartphones on Sailfish will begin in 2019. At the same time, the operating system is planning to find a new name that would reflect its national identity, RNS reported referring to the head of Rostelecom Mikhail Oseevsky. At Sailfish is already working, for example, smartphone Inoi R7, which was released in April 2017 and produced in China. While it is known that 15 thousand devices were purchased by the "Post of Russia", one more thing was sold to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev free of charge. In April, Kommersant reported that Inoi, not showing high sales of products on Saifish in the corporate sector, is in talks with retailers about the sales of its smartphones on Android.
Initially Sailfish was developed by the Finnish company Jolla, in which former employees of Nokia worked. In 2015 it became known that the majority owner of Jolla became the owner of the UST Grigory Berezkin. Adaptation Sailfish for Russia was engaged in "Open mobile platform", which, according to Kartoteka.ru, since 2016 belonged to Olga Berezkina and Vladimir Verozub. In March 2018, 75% of the company acquired Rostelecom. Then it became known about the new requirement for Russian developers of mobile office software. Since 2019, they have to create versions of their applications for the Russian mobile OS if they want to get on the register of domestic software, which gives advantages in public purchases compared to foreign products. Earlier, experts noted the lack of applications for this OS as one of the main obstacles for the delivery of devices based on it in the public sector.
However, smartphones on Sailfish have the required minimum of applications: mail, browser, etc., and more to officials on work phones and do not need, said the leading analyst of the Mobile Research Group Eldar Murtazin. "Now they use their own devices at work or bought by the company. The market of the latter is about 2.5 million pieces per year, "Mr. Murtazin estimates. Other experts of Kommersant estimated this market lower - about 400 thousand a year.
For example, in 2014, two "daughters" of Rosneft decided to purchase Apple's smartphones for 1.5 million rubles. This decision was made despite the "strict, strict savings" in the company, as it is a "reliable" technique, while the Russian YotaPhone is "expensive" and is not suitable for corporate use, explained the vice-president of Rosneft Mikhail Leontiev. And in June 2018, Kommersant reported that MegaFon will supply 3.5 thousand tablets Samsung for 75.3 million rubles. Department of Information Technology in Moscow for doctors. Then the interlocutors "Kommersant" explained that the corporate line of tablets Samsung has a high level of data protection, because of what they are purchased on public procurement, even in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.