A Russian Software Billionaire Takes on SAP and Oracle

Boris Nuraliev looks a lot like the Soviet-era statistician he once was, with his big wire-rim glasses and bushy mustache, shock-proof Timex watch, and vintage IBM laptop loaded with decades-old software. But there’s little Soviet about 1C, the company he founded 26 years ago that has grown into Russia’s No. 2 seller of enterprise accounting programs, making Nuraliev a billionaire. Today, millions of Russians use 1C Co.’s applications for payroll, financial planning, and controlling factories, and 300,000 coders can program in its proprietary language. “We’ve basically created an entire industry,” Nuraliev says, using a DOS-based file manager to fetch a spreadsheet from his computer.

Nuraliev, 58, got started in technology during the Soviet era as a computer engineer in the State Statistics Committee. In 1991 he founded 1C to sell business programs such as the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and networking software to link computers in the pre-internet age. He soon added his own accounting applications, though he struggled to close big deals. “Large firms felt ashamed of using 1C,” Nuraliev says. But his software was flexible and cheap, a big draw for the thousands of small and midsize companies that sprang up after the fall of communism.