OREANDA-NEWS American Microsoft may stop renewing subscriptions to its products and services in the Russian Federation due to difficulties with their payment, Microsoft said in a letter to one of its corporate customers published by the information and analytical agency TelecomDaily.

The name of the customer is not given in the letter itself. The document states that Microsoft can no longer accept payments by bank transfer to a local bank account as a payment method for the company's services in Russia. Therefore, after September 30 of this year, this customer will no longer be able to renew their existing subscriptions.

The letter was sent on behalf of the Microsoft 365 technical support service, a cloud service within which various classic, mobile and web applications, as well as Microsoft cloud services are available to users (about 30, most of them are various office software and communication tools). Most of them are available under the "subscription" model.

"All subscriptions active as of September 30 will be valid for the remainder of the relevant subscription period in accordance with the terms of your agreement," the letter says. "However, these subscriptions will not be subject to renewal."

At the time of publication, a number of large corporate customers and Russian IT companies working with corporate customers interviewed by Interfax did not confirm receipt of similar messages from Microsoft or declined to comment on this topic. "We have not received such a notification," one large Russian company said. - But earlier, in May, Microsoft disconnected us from a number of its services. In just a few days, we switched to our own similar solution."

"We have not received any letters from Microsoft technical support," the Russian Post told Interfax. "The company has long minimized the risks associated with software developers from unfriendly countries, in particular with Microsoft."

Currently, there is no "single" competitor (in terms of a set of products and services) for Microsoft 365 in the Russian Federation. So, for example, similar Yandex services ("360.Yandex") and VK include about 10 basic services (mail, for working with documents, messengers, communication tools, etc.). In addition, there are developers of various solutions on the Russian market that are available to private and corporate users both in the "box" and from the cloud. For example, developers of office software "P7" and "New cloud technologies" ("MoyOfis").

The majority of Russian developers of software products, which are analogues of solutions included in Microsoft 365, noted in the first half of last year that after the departure of foreign vendors from the Russian market, interest in their products (the number of requests, including for their approbation) increased significantly. However, the volume of product sales in most cases turned out to be not so significant - it is assumed that the mass transition of corporate customers to use the corresponding software of Russian developers will begin this year and continue next.

As reported, at the beginning of March 2022, Microsoft suspended the sale of its products, as well as the provision of new services in Russia and Belarus, but at the same time continued to support existing customers at that time. Then Microsoft stated that it would continue to fulfill all existing contractual obligations with Russian customers.

According to media reports, in April of this year, Microsoft sent out about 1 thousand Russian customers who did not fall under anti-Russian sanctions, proposals to extend software licenses.