As I wandered around the Gilbane Boston 2008 show last week, the question I heard people asking each other most often was some variation of: "How's business?" Almost everyone is trying to figure out what the economic train wreck is doing (or might do) to IT spending.

The Good News is that showgoers were, by and large, surprisingly optimistic. It seems in particular that government spending on Web and Search technologies hasn't abated (yet). "We've seen deals take longer to close," one vendor told me, "but they do eventually close. They don't just evaporate. At least, not yet."I was sitting at a table in the Press Room with John Newton (Alfresco CTO & Chairman) and Yogesh Gupta (FatWire CEO) when the discussion turned to economic conditions and what the current malaise might mean for the Web CMS world going forward. Newton proclaimed that it was a great time to be in Open Source. (No surprise there.) A somewhat philosophical Gupta responded by saying: "Macroeconomic conditions really don't impact my business." (Newton's eyebrows went up.) "What I mean is," Gupta clarified, "it does not take all that many new leads, or new deals, for us to hit our 2009 numbers. It is really a very small number. And some of those deals can come from existing customers. Considering the overall size of the market, and how few deals we have to close in order to continue to do well, the larger economy is not even something I worry about."

Evidently, not everyone is worried about the sky falling.As I wandered around the Gilbane Boston 2008 show recently, the question I heard people asking each other most often was some variation of: "How's business?" Almost everyone is trying to figure out what the economic train wreck is doing (or might do) to IT spending. The Good News is that showgoers were, by and large, surprisingly optimistic...