The continued acceptance and penetration of open source applications within the enterprise, and the resulting growth of vendors like ourselves, has lead to an increasing number of market partnerships. We saw it ourselves last year, as have many other open source application providers and infrastructure players.

This trend really started to reach critical mass in 2008, and should continue throughout this year, as open source vendors continue to join forces and offer certified and pre-configured infrastructure and application solutions that make things easier for customers. Partnerships such as these create a better way to compete with existing providers, ala similar strategies by behemoths such as IBM and Oracle. And in a lot of ways, I see the economic downturn providing a silver lining by being a catalyst for such joint ventures.

And moves such as these only make it easier on developers, allowing the community to focus on building out additional functionality or scalability, as opposed to back-end integration between legacy systems.

Nor are these partnerships limited to just on-premise, as these joint ventures will continue to propel open source and cloud computing hand-in-hand, giving customers options for both on-site deployments or for hosting in “the cloud.”

Partnership-driven open source products will only provide market competition and spur innovation that opens up important choices in the world of IT software.