Tom Berquist, Executive Vice President and CFO of Ingres delivered a speech at the Open Source Meets Business Forum held in Nuremberg in late January. His main message was that the current global economic crisis shouldn’t impact open source much in 2009.

Tom believes that because of their strategic position in infrastructure Software as a Service (SaaS), open source software should take advantage of the accelerated growth of SaaS and the growing adoption of cloud architecture computing. In addition, since it’s now accepted that open source is a way to streamline business investments, the market should “take advantage” of the declining investment in proprietary software.

Tom foresees the convergence of SaaS and open source in the coming years, with open source taking on a larger role in enterprise IT infrastructures and a sharp rise of SaaS applications in the field. He adds that open source vendors should benefit from the significant VC investments in the SaaS market. To a certain degree, we moved in this direction when we launched Talend On Demand and connectors to major SaaS solutions such as SugarCRM or Salesforce.com.

Every year, the analyst firm The 451 Group publishes a report on investments made to open source software vendors. In 2008, these investments grew 35.5% over the previous year, reaching more than $458 million. Although there was some slowdown in the last quarter, analysts like Tom Berquist are optimistic about 2009. Our own fundraising, hailed by the press, confirms this analysis. When the model of a company and its prospects are strong, investors don’t hesitate to support its development.

A bit of optimism won’t do any harm in the current context. I think that the crisis should encourage us to continue to innovate and invent new models to help companies worldwide to develop. This is what Talend and its partners do every day. And thanks to our investors, we are not going to stop.

Bertrand