We are excited to announce that IBM has partnered with Zend to offer a self-service Enterprise PHP platform on IBM SmartCloud PaaS. This IBM offering will ensure that IBM customers have a single point of contact for their application delivery requirements. IBM’s customers will get the benefits of Zend’s solution and expertise in enabling enterprise PHP, coupled with IBM’s innovation and support around the cloud, as well as the joint innovation, integration and support that the partnership delivers.
Highlights of the PHP Platform include:
- IBM & Zend have built self-service, ready-to-go Enterprise PHP application environments. These deployments are auto-scaling and fault tolerant out of the box.
- IBM is being very aggressive in how they are pricing the offering. No doubt, IBM is serious about the cloud. They are innovating both on functionality and the overall business model in order to deliver a differentiated value-proposition.
- Zend Server’s DevOps & automation capabilities integrate deeply with IBM SmartCloud‘s automation capabilities. [See Zend Server DevOps Video for a short overview of Zend Server]
- Zend Server’s mobile gateway makes it incredibly simple for customers to build and deploy API-first architectures for mobile apps. These APIs can easily be deployed into IBM SmartCloud and leveraged by IBM Worklight.
- Zend Server’s Web and mobile monitoring capabilities make it easy for customers to tie application-specific metrics and monitoring data into their single pane-of-glass monitoring & management systems.
- Zend Server not only allows existing IBM customers to interoperate with their existing IBM assets, such as IBM DB2 and IBM WebSphere, but also has out-of-the-box option for Web-centric assets such as MongoDB, MySQL, social platforms and other technologies that are critical to meet the requirements of modern Web and mobile apps.
IBM & Zend have had a strong strategic partnership for many years. We have jointly enabled a broad set of IBM customers including Starbucks, DHL, Prada, and many others. These customers have been able to take full advantage of opportunities in Web and mobile, due to PHP and Zend’s ability to deliver faster, more iterative apps while retaining high quality.
We all recognize that enterprise development and operations teams are under extreme pressure to more effectively deliver value to their business owners. This is especially true in the age of mobility and cloud services, which is a big paradigm shift in how companies engage their target audiences. Also, business owners in this day and age are becoming increasingly opinionated with regards to the user experience they wish to drive. Businesspeople themselves are consumers of a broad set of engaging mobile applications and cloud services.
In this new era of engagement, PHP continues to shine in its ability to deliver value rapidly and at a high level of quality to Web and mobile users. PHP runs over 39 percent of the Web workload [Netcraft: PHP Grows & Grows]. Seventy-five percent of developers using dynamic languages for mobile apps are using PHP [Evans Data Survey: Mobile Development Survey 2012, v2]. Therefore, it makes a huge amount of sense for IBM, the leader in enterprise IT and Zend, the leader in PHP app development, to partner to deliver a great solution for the mobile-first Enterprise.
It has been a great pleasure to have worked with the IBM on building this out over the past year and a half. We are very much looking forward to supporting IBM in rolling this offering out into the market and winning over enterprise customers for this platform. We are also looking forward to partnering on further innovations from both IBM & Zend, some of which are already in the pipeline, in order to strengthen the solution for enterprise customers.
If your company has interest in exploring the IBM SmartCloud, feel free to contact me and I’ll route you to the right person or sign-up on the IBM Web site for a Free 60 day trial of IBM SmartCloud.
Happy PHP’ing!
