YEREVAN. - Armenia strongly falls behind in using IT in economy, CEO of the Union of Information Technology Enterprises (UITE) Karen Vardanyan told journalists Wednesday.

In his words, the main reason is the structure of the country’s economy: it has small number of medium-sized enterprises competing with each other, and they are not strong enough to be able to order IT-solutions.

“Our main resource is the state, which orders systems of electronic management: we have established a consortium of 15 companies, which mainly cover the needs of the given market. The next resource is the army, and we saw that the IT application was not at the proper level here,” he said.

The main strategic problem lies in the structure of the Armenian economy, which should be changed. “It’s reasonable to use IT solutions if your work is in a competitive sphere,” he said adding that oligarchs and monopolists are interested by IT solutions only from the standpoint of the company’s security and workers’ control.

However, more serious solutions which will give competitive advantages aren’t demanded since the monopolists have nobody to compete with. Thus, according to Vardanyan, the issue of using IT can be solved only through changing the structure of the economy towards an innovative one.