Several analysts have published numbers this summer that I think are worth mentioning.

The deep entrenchment of open source solutions in enterprises keeps increasing. According to IDC, the worldwide open source market will grow by 25% each year until 2011, at which point it will be worth $5.8 billion – to compare to $1.8 billion in 2006.

Not only will the open source software market weight two to three times more than enterprise content management software ($2.6 billion according to Gartner), but a 25% annual growth rate is an impressive one. As a comparison, Gartner evaluates the growth of enterprise portal software, or ERP solutions, to 14% annually.

Of course this growth is phenomenal and the numbers are impressive. But I can’t help thinking that we haven’t seen anything yet. The growth potential is several orders of magnitude larger. These numbers deal with the worldwide open source market, in all domains. But in each of these areas, like Talend’s data integration domain, a $13 billion market, growth perspectives seem unlimited. Soon, in most areas, the open source market share will reach 50%, and I would not be surprised if it were even exceeding this number.

Soon, some day, we won’t measure the open source market anymore, but the share of open source software as compared to proprietary software, in each domain: integration, CRM, accounting, BI, etc. That day, we will have won our bet.

Bertrand