The brainchild of husband and wife team Pia and Jeff Waugh, Waugh Partners has three main focus areas - strategic consulting, industry development, and research and analysis.

Strategic consulting will advise businesses how to build open source into their IT strategies, industry development aims to address the need for open source skills development and aid open source companies with media exposure, and the research and analysis division will provide independent research on the challenges and opportunities for open source in the local market.

Pia and Jeff are certainly two peas in a pod with Pia working part-time as research coordinator for Australian Service for Knowledge on Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) at Macquarie University, and Jeff a founding member of Ubuntu Linux at Canonical.

"We've found there is a huge demand of a vendor-inclusive, independent voice in the open source industry," Jeff Waugh said, adding people need to understand the potential for open source outside the "vendor propaganda".

"The foundations of open begin with open source but it doesn't just end there and it's not the only thing that is important in this industry," he said. "So are open standards. If the Internet was based on open standards we wouldn't have had the explosion in e-commerce."