BANGALORE, INDIA: 2008 was an eventful, breakthrough year for many open source companies, and 2009 will be even more so, especially in terms of business purchasing patterns, software business model shifts, and enterprise software stack evolution. The current economic conditions will certainly prompt businesses to look more closely at alternative IT solutions - and open source technology will be one of the big winners next year.

75 pc developers employ open source in APAC

Here's a look at a few 2009 open source market predictions that I believe will re-shape the software market in the coming year.

1. Adoption of open source software will increase as the economy worsens.

As the 2008 recession extends into 2009, it will change the software landscape, as the economic 'shock' forces businesses to make structural changes to their IT strategies to drive down costs.

Open source software eliminates up-front licensing costs and drives down the total costs of new projects. It also introduces competition that will be used by customers to improve their negotiating position with the oligopoly of proprietary software vendors that dominate the market.

MySQL becoming more attractive in India

Open source companies will see stronger year-over-year revenue growth than the proprietary software sector. Our company, Ingres, an open source database provider, recently announced that 2008 revenues will grow by more than 25 percent over 2007 versus traditional industry software growth rates at 7 to 8 percent annually.

Growth rates for propriety vendors will take a hit despite moves by traditional companies like Oracle to actually raise prices during the economic downturn. The company's 45 percent increase on its BEA acquired-WebLogic application server, for instance, is causing customer migration to JBoss' open source enterprise application server.

2. Open source adoption will accelerate across the full infrastructure software stack and into applications.

As more companies seek innovative solutions that do more with less, they will follow the early adopters who ten years ago pioneered the use of the Linux operating system and in recent years have been using open source throughout their infrastructure stack. Areas of significant infrastructure adoption include Application Servers, Messaging and Databases, especially for Java-based applications, which are standardized and relatively easy to port to open source solutions. At the application level, we'll see accelerating adoption of Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) solutions.