The exhibition and forum Russian Infocommunications – XXI Century (InfoCom 2007) is held for the 7th time. It was first organized in autumn 2001 with the support of the then Ministry of Communications to compete the Sviaz-Expocomm exhibition which dominated the ICT sector of exhibition business. After InfoCom 2001 had been held in Moscow such exhibitions took place in the federal districts centers – unlike its competitor InfoCom staked on regions, with InfoCom 2002 was held in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Perm and InfoCom 2003 took place in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnodar and Novosibirsk. In 2004 St. Petersburg was added to the list (you can read the news on spbIT.ru of October 19, 2004). In 2005 Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Rostov-on-Don saw the exhibition. Last year InfoCom was held in the both capitals, Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk. It moved to Samara in Volga (Privolzhskiy) Federal District and to Krasnodar in Southern Federal District.

This year organizers of the exhibition focused on two cities: Moscow where centralized forum was held in accordance with a revised conception of the event and Krasnodar (Krasnodar Region has been awarded the status of a “partner region”) owing to the fact that Sochi was designated as the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympics. All the formal events took place in Moscow and Krasnodar and one of InfoCom’s subdivisions worked in Samara. St. Petersburg was involved in the event only with 3G videoconferencing held between its Governor Valentina Matvienko and Leonid Reiman, the Minister of IT and Communications.

During first years the number of participants in the exhibition was rather moderate. Most of them were enterprises related to the Ministry such as Sviazinvest, Rostelekom, Kosmicheskaya Sviaz and MegaFon. Other big suppliers joined them to win the support. The culmination was last year when Sistema Telecom, the biggest participant in Sviaz-Expocomm, first exhibited at the InfoCom. At the same time we were informed that Sistema Telecom wouldn’t be present on Krasnaya Presnya next year (Sviaz-Expocom is traditionally held there in May) where it used to rent the whole Forum pavilion.

Today InfoCom is still second in the number of participants to Sviaz-Expocomm as the participation even decreased compared to last year (from 400 to a little more than 250) after organizers had decided not to hold it in regions. As an example, almost 800 companies were represented at Sviaz-Expocomm in 2006 and it gathered more than 650 participants in May 2007. This year InfoCom still won in quality as no major vendors participated in Sviaz-Expocomm except Asian companies ZTE and Huawei and Russian IskraTel subdivision IskraUralTel. At IEC Crocus Expo, where InfoCom is traditionally held, many leading companies exhibited including Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson, Huawei, Nortel, Motorola, IskraTel, IBM, HP, Avaya, Cisco, NEC. Also big integrators are starting to be among participants at InfoCom, e.g. TechnoServ A/S and Compulink Group (TechnoServ A/S and UNI Corporation were present at Sviaz-Expocomm this year).

Leonid Reiman, the RF ICT Minister was traditionally present at the opening of the exhibition InfoCom 2007. He said: “Today InfoCom became a display of advanced ideas and opportunities to use information technologies in every field: medicine and construction industry, agriculture and education, government and business. InfoCom 2007 is of interest not only to professionals but also to users. All the advantages that technology concepts and services offer will be demonstrated to the visitors of the exhibition. InfoCom’s growth from year to year is a reflection of market reality, with the volume of information and communication technologies market reaches a billion mark”. Minister also informed about beginning of construction of technological parks. All the documentation related to this project will be prepared by the end of the year. Kazan technological park will open soon. Another one is created in Novosibirsk. The exhibition had a special sector dedicated to Russia’s technological parks. Besides the said Kazan’s Idea and Siberian project it also represented Ankudinovka in Nizhny Novgorod, technological park in Chernogolovka, projects in Tyumen, Dubna and Kuzbas. Another technopark is created on the base of the University of Telecommunications in St. Petersburg.

This year’s InfoCom had a highly topical program. Every day schedule included business events and “Technologies for everyone” area. Within the framework of the business program forums, round tables and seminars by companies as well as international conferences with Chinese, Japanese and Israeli partners were held. Participants in “Technologies for everyone” considered issues of IT application in socioeconomic sphere, public administration and culture. During all four days of the exhibition visitors could get information about job vacancies in the leading IT-companies at the InfoCom’s job fair.

The company Sistema, a big exhibitor at InfoCom gathered all of its subsidiaries in one exposition and even IT-companies Sitronix Group and RTI Sistema though it occupied only a big stand rather than the whole pavilion this year. MUTN (Moscow Urban Telephone Network) announced services of broadband access to the Internet which it lately promotes together with Stream (see the news of September 25, 2007). Skylink put an accent on rebranding and new initiatives (see the news of October 26, 2007). Multiregional TransitTelecom expanded its long-distance services and packages and presented its new subscribers portal (see the news of October 25, 2007). MTS presented new services including those of 3G and performed test broadcasting of a live transmission by the Russian informational TV channel Vesti in collaboration with Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. Another mobile operator and large exhibitor MegaFon demonstrated 3G call in St. Petersburg contributing to Leonid Reiman and Valentina Matvienko’s 3G videoconferencing while in Moscow this event was supported by MTS. At InfoCom exhibition MegaFon introduced a mobile-wallet service (see today’s news). Regional subdivisions of the operator were present at its stand.

Large vendors’ expositions were dedicated to the third generation services. Thus, Ericsson demonstrated 3G multi-media service See me on TV, with video calls from a 3G phone connected people in the TV channel O2 studio and at Ericsson’s stand. The company Huawei Technologies displayed its current achievements in mobile technologies under the motto Taking mobile into IP world, underlining transition to packet-switching networks and wide use of IP protocol, particularly in new generation cellular networks UMTS/HSPA, the primary trend in the telecommunications sphere. Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated possibilities of convergent broadband services including its IMS, IP-TV and WiMAX solutions. These three directions together with 3G technology were also represented at Nokia Siemens Networks’s exposition (see the news of October 24, 2007). Domestic vendors showed their adherence to modern trends too, with MFI Soft introduced Russian Call Center – the first NGN solution for fixed-line operators in Russia.

The company Sviazinvest presented its regional daughters together with a spectrum of new services such as ADSL broadband access promoted by them in the local markets. At InfoCom Sviazinvest’s daughter Rostelecom confirmed its participation in prepaid card mobile operator Zebra Telecom and announced plans to win 30% of the Russian trunk Internet market by 2010 (in 2007 its share on the trunk datacom market reached 10%). Today Rostelecom’s IP MPLS data transmission network includes 9 major nodes and 70 regional nodes. In 2008 the company plans to ramp up the number of regional nodes to 100.

Mention may be made of the Central Telegraph that put emphasis on its QWERTY ADSL Internet access service. Synterra shared exposition booth with its subsidiary RTComm.RU. The company advanced some of its latest initiatives such as creating of WiMAX partner networks in regions and development of data-handling centers.
Russian Post as always promoted its public services including “CyberPocht” (Internet Public Access Outlets), “CyberDengui” etc. This year the company also presented a specialized IPAO operation solution aimed at interactive operating IPAO network, getting information on status, availability, incomings etc. State bodies at InfoCom were represented by all regional subdivisions of the FSUE Radio Frequency Center of the Central federal area.

Web-projects and open source software (Linux) were present at Infocom on a larger scale than ever. Participation of Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru, Liveinternet.ru and Rambler at the exhibition was backed by awarding of prizes to winners in the contest of IT-blogs organized by Formika. As to the open source, within the framework of InfoLinux were gathered companies Linuxcenter and Mandriva and were held open master classes on Linux, open source software and Perl programming. Today such products are considered as a choice for application in educational and state institutions.

The exhibition stand prepared by the ICT Ministry was mainly dedicated to the use of the technologies in national projects, here were represented companies and implemented projects in construction industry, housing and public utilities, education and agro-industrial complex.

Besides it was stated at Infocom 2007 that within the framework of the national project “Public Health” the creation of broadband Internet access network in Russia’s health care institutions will start next year. For this purpose a tender for setting up a telemedicine network will be held in the beginning of 2008, terms and conditions of bidding will be published on the site of the ICT Ministry. This project promises to be of the same scope as the initiative to link up Russian schools to the Internet, which started last year and is almost accomplished today, with more than 52 500 schools throughout Russia already linked up. The total project budget amounted to 3 billion rubles.