Mon Dieu! I’m still amazed by the vibrancy and ardor of the French open source community, as evidenced by their participation in the recent Open World Forum in Paris. Granted, there was a home field advantage at work, but I was still swept up in their excitement over the growing use of open source for both enterprise and SMB.

One item of particular note is that many French systems integrators are focusing purely on open source applications. Even those that were traditionally proprietary software implementers have established open source departments or practice groups. For example, Accenture was a sponsor of the event – not really a company that we think about as having a stake in open source, but there they were. At least in Europe, Accenture is seeing supporting open source as a very viable business opportunity.

A recent market survey by research firm, Markness, in France shows that 96% of the public sector is using open source. Next to running databases and web sites, open source is mostly used for IT administration. Markness expects that in 2011 some 63 percent of firms and organizations will use open source office applications.

Already, many municipalities are moving away from Microsoft-based environments toward a Linux OS and FOSS, like OpenOffice.org. The French Gendarmerie has saved 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org in lieu of Microsoft Windows and Office.

This is good news for companies like KnowledgeTree because it doesn’t take any further convincing during the sales cycle that open source is good for business. We can sell based on the merits of the product, without having to additionally sell the open source concept. And for that we can only say “ooh la la!”