Russian Company To Launch Multi-Million Dollar Alternative to U.S. Cloud Products

A Russian IT company is working on a new, million-dollar cloud storage product to rival those of Amazon and Microsoft, national business daily Kommersant reports.

The company, Parallels, unveiled the new project, which is called "Rosplatforma", in a presentation attended by Kommersant. The creators of the new cloud said they wanted to make it "the foundation for the electronic sovereignty of Russia," and that they were committed to giving Russia technological independence from American products including Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud and Amazon Cloud. The company is planning to spend more than 1 billion roubles ($16 million) on the project.

According to Parallels, Russia relies heavily on foreign software, estimating that the U.S. and other foreign companies have a 75 percent of the market share in the country, worth around 90 billion rubles ($1.4 billion), and that this reliance is "an unacceptable risk."

The company met with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and requested public funding from the government for the project but were refused, according to Kommersant. It is now pursuing third party fundraising.

In recent years the Russian state has encouraged initiatives to allow Moscow more independence from foreign technology companies. In November 2014, St. Petersburg's Presidential Library announced it was developing its own version of Wikipedia, saying that the encyclopedia website was "unreliable" in regard to its information about Russia.

In May, Russian media reported that the government was in talks with Finnish mobile phone company Jolla, to develop a Russian-made operating system to rival Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating system. Jolla later denied that the project was in the works, but told tech news site The Verge that Russia is seeking to reduce its reliance on iOS and Android by promoting existing Jolla products with Linux-based operating systems.

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Lucy is the deputy news editor for Newsweek Europe. Twitter: @DraperLucy

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