Hungary’s leading service provider in the software development sector, FreeSoft won the four-year Hungarian government’s open source software tender in collaboration with Ingres, the specialist in open source database management.

During the next four years, a consortium of seven companies led by FreeSoft will supply the Hungarian government in a tender worth 4bn Hungarian forints (about Ђ15m), representing roughly 20% of the overall IT budget that the government has available over the next years. Chosen as the open source database partner, Ingres will play a key role in the development of FreeSoft’s projects.

“What’s really positive is that the Hungarian government established a process which will definitely speed up the projects that are going to be defined over the next years, by preselecting the consortium and therefore also the technologies,” sales and services managing director of Ingres Germany, Bertram Mandel (left) told IT Europa.

According to CEO of Ingres, Roger Burkard this is one of the largest open source procurements ever run, and this should lead other government bodies to follow Hungary’s lead and benefit from the cost savings that come with an open source deployment. “We applaud the Hungarian government for leading the way in introducing competition and cutting back on proprietary software purchases,” he said.

This is the first time the Hungarian government decides to publish a tender for a software framework agreement in the open source sector, recognising that this could liberate itself from its dependency on the software development and pricing policies of proprietary providers, as well as help slash public spending with no advance license fees or hidden exit costs.

Having met in November 2008, Ingres worked with FreeSoft on the very beginning of the Hungarian government’s project opportunity. “As we concentrated our efforts in establishing the partnership on that very specific project opportunity, we worked with FreeSoft on the proposals that came in enabling FreeSoft to participate in that tender, coming with the technical resources and business development resources that were needed for,” explained Mandel.

“We do have a business plan that is wider than this specific project,” he added, but “We see that as a reinforcement of the partnership that we established more than a year ago when we started to promote an open source stake.”

Listed on the Budapest stock exchange, FreeSoft has seen its share price rocket by 60%, said its CEO, Ilona Eck. To her, “This tender is further proof that the time for open source has changed and that the commercial open source business model will change the world of software business.”