The departure of Oracle and Microsoft from Russia - what has changed in the use of project management information systems?

The article offers a practical assessment of the consequences of Oracle’s and Microsoft’s departure for Russian users of project management systems such as Primavera and MS Project. The author argues that little has fundamentally changed: most companies continue using familiar software through parallel-import arrangements, without vendor agreements or license payments. The key technical factor identified is that these are desktop and server-based solutions that store data on the user’s own infrastructure, making it technically impossible to disable access. The main losses are technical support, which the author’s experience suggests was always ineffective, and updates, with software functionality said to have changed by only a few percent over a decade. The author emphasizes that the break with vendors in this field has been far less disruptive than in engineering design software. Russian software is developing rapidly and new products are appearing, but detailed discussion of them is outside the article’s scope. The key takeaway is that, for practical work with schedule network models and project management, the vendors’ departure has not created critical obstacles: parallel imports and established functionality continue to meet the need.

This is one of the questions I often hear.

In fact, not much has changed: in my estimation, Most companies continue to work on Oracle Primavera or Microsoft Project. It's just that since 2022, the use of this software is mainly based on "parallel import schemes", in the absence of agreements with vendors and without paying the cost of licenses.

What are the risks of working without a license?

I won't undertake to assess the legal risks, but technically I don't see any particular risks. The key point here is that Primavera and Project are not cloud solutions. All data is stored on your servers and the option in which someone disables your access to it is simply technically impossible.

In this situation, the absence of an agreement with the vendor de facto entails the following costs:

1. Lack of technical support

2. Lack of updates (new software versions)

I can't call either the first or the second a serious problem. I have worked with both Project and Primavera since 2011. During this time, there were many new software releases, but de facto the functionality of the programs changed by a maximum of a few percent. In principle, you can now take the Primavera version from ten years ago and work in it quite fully.

Regarding those. support: during all this time I contacted Oracle support 1 time, on a minor issue, received the answer "we'll take it into account in the next release", made a "crutch" and went on working. I didn't have to communicate with Microsoft - my colleagues did, and they were not happy with the quality and speed of the answers.

In general, the severance of relations with vendors in our topic is proceeding quite calmly (for related companies, for example, design software, everything is much more painful).

What about Russian software?

It is actively developing, many new programs are appearing. To be honest, the emergence of new programs and the development of old ones is now happening at such a speed that I simply do not have time to keep track of all the news, so I would prefer to refrain from discussing specific products and vendors.