Every fifth Russian company manages its high-tech assets in a Microsoft Excel sheet

A massive market study conducted by SimpleOne along with several partners, including Softline and ITGLOBAL.COM, revealed that corporate infrastructure in the region is a complete black hole of unmonitored hardware.

In most surveyed companies, bookkeeping, IT, and administration live in completely different universes. The accounting department keeps track of one set of servers, the system administrators use another, while half of the remaining data is either stashed in a messy spreadsheet or simply stored in the head of a senior sysadmin who might quit tomorrow. This glorious chaos leads to situations where expensive equipment is officially registered but sits gathering dust in a hallway, while the actual production servers do not legally exist.

The survey, which queried over a hundred companies across retail, banking, and heavy industry, shows that four out of five businesses rate their asset management maturity as practically nonexistent. Instead of using advanced automation or specialized software, forty-two percent of companies operate with absolutely zero standards or regulatory frameworks, relying entirely on the classic Slavic method of "we will figure it out when it breaks."

Specialized IT asset management systems are utilized by a meager eighteen percent of respondents, while accounting software and generic ticketing tools split the rest of the pie. As a result, the absolute top priority for thirty percent of these enterprises is just figuring out what equipment they actually own.

The dream of high-tech autonomy looks hilarious when the foundation of a nation's corporate infrastructure is literally a copy of Microsoft Excel. It turns out that before building sovereign neural networks, one must first master the ancient art of counting their own laptops.