The ISDEF 2005 annual conference took place at the Holiday Inn Vinogradovo Hotel, Moscow.

The fourth international ISDEF conference, ISDEF 2005, took place from October 13 to 16.  More than 500 individuals, representing 306 companies from 105 cities and 25 countries, gathered in the Vinogradovo Holiday Inn, just outside Moscow, in order to discuss issues relating to the development of the software market.

Each successive ISDEF conference attracts more and more participants; 2005 saw a 20% increase in participants over 2004. This year interest in the event was so great that all rooms at the Holiday Inn were taken more than two weeks before the start of the conference.

“Today ISDEF has become the event that all the players in the IT market know about. Many people construct their plans around the dates that the conference is being held. This is because ISDEF is the one event that is essential to attend,” states Dmitry Kourashev, representative of ISDEF’s governing board. “Our conference is growing year after year in both quantity and quality. ISDEF is becoming one of the most important happenings in the IT world.”

“With each new conference new people show up, who bring new ideas.” The main theme of Dmitry’s welcoming speech in the plenary session can be expressed in this way.

Within the 4 years of its existence, ISDEF has grown from being a programming conference to a major IT event, in many ways defining the trends and development of the IT sector as a whole. The make-up of the participants and the themes of the main presentations and round-tables serve as the best confirmation of this.

The ISDEF 2005 presentations and round-tables took place in parallel in three halls of the Holiday Inn and all were associated with one of the following thematic sections:

  • Plenary session
  • Software marketing
  • Legal and regulatory issues
  • Systems and methods of company management
  • Investment in IT-business
  • The games market
  • Technological partnership

As was expected, this year the sections on marketing and investment in IT-business offered the most and were the best-attended.

During some of the presentations in the Marketing Section hall not even “standing room” could be found. Such great interest may be explained by the fact that the majority of the talks were of a practical, application-oriented nature. Those who shared their experiences included Dmitry Grishin (Mail.ru), Andrei Nikishin (Kaspersky Labs), Brant Palazza (Digital River), Tatyana Tsvetkova (Softkey), Ratmir Timashev (ABRT Technology Fund), Mikhail Penykovsky (Agnitum), Sergey Ryzhikov (Bitrix) and other speakers whose knowledge may today be considered expert in the IT sector.

Nevertheless, this year investment in IT-business became the central theme. The most notable participants of ISDEF 2005 attended this section – Cisco, Google, IBM, IBS, Index Ventures, Insight Partners; Intel Capital, Russian Technologies Venture Fund, Fractal Capital, Prime Technology Ventures, Vector Capital, PRADO Audit, Finam. All those who participated noted the fact that the Russian market possesses great potential, and that interest in the IT sector on the part of both Western and Russian investors is bound to grow.

Conference sponsors were as follows:

The conference took place with the following information media support:

3Dnews (www.3dnews.ru)
Cnews (www.cnews.ru)
IXBT.com (www.ixbt.com)
PCWEEK Russian edition (www.pcweek.ru) and SKPress Publishers
Connect! Publishing House (www.connect.ru)
Open Systems Publications (www.osp.ru)
Algorithm Information Agency (www.algo.ru)
Computerra (www.computerra.ru)
RSDN (www.rsdn.ru)
AdRiver (www.adriver.ru)
Russian Documents (www.rusdoc.ru)
PHPClub (www.phpclub.ru)
Download.ru (www.download.ru)