On 8-10 June 2005 Atlas-park hotel hosted the First corporate forum on information technologies for businesses and enterprises-members of AFC "System". The event was organized by the group of companies “Research centre” and “Quasar-Micro” company. Besides heads of corporation and its businesses the forum was attended by specially invited representatives of the leading world IT companies, Russian Academy of Sciences, and regional representatives.

The main topics discussed at the forum were the following: influence of information technologies on business and business requirements to information technologies.

According to Evgeniy Utkin, head of “Quasar-Micro” company, the topic of partnership among government and business in different spheres, including the sphere of information technologies, at present comes to the fore. He expressed confidence that initiatives raised at the forum can dramatically change the traditional point of view on adoption of ICTs by the government. One of such initiatives covers transferring from government to private business some functions implementation of which demands huge investments in information systems.

Among those who were invited at the forum was Yu. Hohlov, academician of the Russian Engineering Academy, Chairman of the Board of the Institute of the Information Society. He made a report on "Multistakeholder partnerships in the Information Society" (MS PowerPoint, 703 Kb), where he expanded on peculiarities of the Information Society and knowledge economy, and carrying out successful partnership programs on implementation of ICT on examples of three infrastructure projects in Dubai (Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Knowledge Village) and governmental outsourcing in the USA and Hong-Kong, and raised a topic for discussion: Russia and knowledge economy.