Today,
Zend and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership that will transform
developer productivity in the cloud. Before I share the details of this news,
I’d like to cover some background on Zend and Microsoft’s past collaboration to
provide additional context on why today’s announcement is significant for both
Zend and Microsoft!
Early
Stealth Relationship
In
2001, a small Microsoft SWAT team focused on winning more Web share for Windows
Server reached out to the PHP Group. They invited us for a few days to Redmond
with the goal of boosting PHP support for Windows. Their motivation was simple:
PHP on Linux had already dominated a major part of Web share and they were
interested in selling more Windows Servers into that market. Hence, PHP needed
to run well on Windows Server. We made some significant improvements during the
few days in Redmond, but that forward-looking team met some internal opposition
for collaborating with PHP. At the time, PHP was viewed as a key competitor to
ASP and much aligned with the competitive open-source Apache web server and Linux
operating system. As a result, this effort remained largely incognito and was
never officially announced although favorable changes to the code base were
incorporated into PHP.net.
From
“Stealth” to “Technical Collaboration”
Five
years later, in 2006, Microsoft started to carefully open up to open source and
the PHP market. We announced a technical collaboration, which was focused on improving
interoperability of PHP and the Windows Server platform. This collaboration was
extremely successful at the technical level. We were successful in making PHP
on Windows rock solid. Microsoft changed its Windows Server “Longhorn” roadmap
late in the game, and, based on our feedback, added FastCGI support to IIS 7 to
better run PHP. We also worked on a number of additional interoperability initiatives.
While there was good Microsoft-supported public exposure to this collaboration and
great technical success, there was still some bumpiness in the joint go-to-market
approach. In my view, Zend was focused on getting deeper into Enterprise (depth
market), while Microsoft preferred to focus their PHP efforts where it was less
likely to compete with Enterprise ASP (the breadth market). That said, technical
collaboration continued to work well for years to come and we jointly supported
some significant joint customers. However, balancing breadth and depth in the
partnership was always a bit of a challenge.
Strategic
Partnership
Today,
in 2015, we are excited to announce a strategic partnership with Microsoft
focused on transforming the developer experience and productivity in the cloud.
While we’re building on past technical synergies, the big difference is that we
are now fully aligned on the market opportunity.
In
past years, Microsoft has evolved into a cloud platform player focused on
delivering the best platform for developers across any language, database or
operating system, whether open source or proprietary. Instead of limiting its open
source efforts to specific target audiences, Microsoft has embraced an open
approach to the market. Microsoft continues to make significant investments in
differentiating Windows and .NET, while also working to personalize and
differentiate the Microsoft experience for open source developers. And PHP,
needless to say, is the biggest Web development community, driven by both
custom application development and the accelerating adoption of leading applications
by businesses such as WordPress, Drupal and Magento. So it makes a lot of sense
to do something “special” on this front.
Z-Ray
– The Technology
Last
July, we released a new technology called Z-Ray focused on transforming the
development experience. Microsoft quickly recognized the potential of this
groundbreaking technology. Z-Ray’s vision is simple: expose all necessary
information developers need to increase their productivity and code quality
while they are developing without changing how they work. This information
could include deep insight into their code performance and quality,
environmental information (cloud storage), tool chain (package management), and
more.
While
Z-Ray has received a lot of interest, our larger vision was bolstered by the
January GA of a new version of Z-Ray, which extended visibility to specific
applications and frameworks including WordPress, Drupal and Magento while adding
strong mobile/API capabilities. Z-Ray to-date has solely been available via a
Zend Server subscription, our professional, complete, value-add PHP stack. Now,
with this partnership, we will also make Z-Ray available as a standalone
capability within the Microsoft Azure cloud which will benefit cloud
developers.
Zend
and Microsoft’s Shared Developer Vision: Our Latest Partnership
Zend
and Microsoft have a shared vision of transforming the developer experience in
the cloud. The initial focus of this latest partnership is to combine the strong
developer experience of Azure App Service (a PaaS) with the innovative
developer experience Z-Ray delivers. In order to optimize the experience for
both existing and new Azure App Service customers, we decided to integrate a
standalone specifically tailored version of Z-Ray directly into the Azure App
Service experience. Ultimately, with an application platform like Azure App
Service, you really shouldn’t have to care about any of the plumbing – you
should be able to go from code to cloud within seconds. Z-Ray will be
pre-integrated and provisioned into PHP-based Web sites, meaning developers can
enable it with the click of a button both for development and production. This
tightly integrated and optimized experience will ensure the broadest set of
developers can access this technology, including casual developers of popular
applications such as WordPress and Drupal as well as mobile/API developers.
What’s
Next?
We
will be demoing this capability at the Microsoft Build conference (April 29th
– May 1st) and we plan to launch a public preview shortly
thereafter. Most of the heavy lifting is already complete, but there is some
polish and testing left. We want to ensure we are delivering a great product
offering.
We
have unveiled a Z-Ray on Azure page, which we will update on an ongoing basis. You
can register for Z-Ray on Azure product updates to be kept informed every step
of the way. If you have any feedback and/or wishes, please feel free to send me
a note directly at andi @ zend . youknowwhat.
And while
we focus on rolling out this exciting new capability, we are already starting
to cook up more Zend and Microsoft Azure news…. Stay tuned!
