Vedomosti announced the impossibility to renew the licenses of Cisco and IBM

According to the newspaper, Russian companies cannot renew licenses for equipment previously purchased by American Cisco and IBM. As the interlocutors of the publication clarified, speech, first of all,

Russian companies using Cisco and IBM equipment cannot renew licenses for equipment previously purchased from these American vendors. This was told to Vedomosti by a representative of one distributor and confirmed by a representative of a large Russian it company. Such licenses must be purchased to activate new equipment or to continue operation and maintenance of previously purchased equipment.

According to a representative of an IT company, Russian companies most often purchased licenses for a year, much less often for two or three years. This means that once previously purchased licenses expire, the equipment will stop working, he explained.

First of all, we are talking about specialized server equipment, created on the basis of the IBM Power microprocessor architecture, which is used to store and process large amounts of data, another source explained to the newspaper. Now IBM Power occupies about 10% of the Russian server market, he noted.

At the same time, Cisco in the Russian market was represented mainly by network equipment intended primarily for large organizations and telecommunications enterprises, the newspaper writes.

Ivan Pokrovsky, CEO of the Association of Electronics Developers and Manufacturers (ARPE), told Vedomosti that companies will soon have to crack licenses to activate equipment. According to him, companies will be forced to take this step, since equipment manufacturers can not only activate, but also disable it at any time.

“Given that IBM and Cisco are industrial systems, there are no pirated versions of software,” he explains, “hacking it is not only illegal, but also unsafe, because the security of broken products depends heavily on how they were protected and how they bypassed protection. In this regard, now many people are thinking about circumventing restrictions such as activation in another country and importing [equipment] to RUSSIA,” Pokrovsky said.

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In turn, the HEAD of the SearchInform analytics department, Alexei Parfentiev, said that companies left without licenses can either use a key purchased through parallel imports or hack equipment.

IBM suspended work in Russia Technology and media

In early March, IBM announced that it was ending the sale of software in Russia and cooperation with Russian defense companies. According to the CEO of the company, Arvind Krishna, the employees came up with such an initiative.

Network equipment manufacturer Cisco announced its withdrawal from Russia on June 23. Prior to this, the company announced the suspension of work in Russia and Belarus due to the Russian military operation in Ukraine and began to deactivate the accounts of communication equipment, which were used to update the software of devices.

CNews, citing sources, wrote that Cisco intends to complete all operations to withdraw from the Russian market on July 4. According to the source of the publication, before the start of the Russian military operation in February, the company brought "a lot" of equipment to Russia, hoping to sell it, and is now looking for a way to take it back.

After the start of the military operation in Ukraine, a number of other American companies, including MICROSOFT, announced the suspension or restriction of activities in Russia. In June, it announced that it would significantly reduce operations in the country due to "a change in the economic outlook and a negative impact on business." On June 23, Corporation President Brad Smith, in an interview with The Washington Post, said that the company would continue to reduce business in Russia and China.