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Andi

Zend and Microsoft Azure Announce Strategic Partnership: Additional Context, Background and Views on the Announcement

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 29^th – May 1^st) 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!

After over 20 years on Windows I am moving to Mac (and why it isn’t a good sign for Microsoft)

I have been active in open source for a good 17 years. At the same time, I have always been loyal to Windows on the desktop while making use of Linux on the server.

On the desktop, I have been a hardcore Microsoft power user for at least 26 years. My very early development experiences started on Microsoft with Basic on MS-DOS 3.3. I embraced Windows 3.1 (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and was likely one of the first people in Israel to get their hands on the final version (RTM) of Windows 95.

Even with my heavy involvement in PHP, which in those days was primarily targeting Linux, I leveraged the Windows platform for my day-to-day desktop use and, in many cases, Visual Studio for advanced debugging, which at the time was still a lot more powerful than the alternatives on Linux.

As I moved from software developer to technical management and then general management roles, I continued to embrace Windows on the desktop. I am an Excel power user. Mastering Word and Powerpoint only proved to me that OpenOffice would never catch up, and many years ago I moved from Eudora Pro to Outlook, which I am very productive in. In addition to that, I know my way around Windows extremely well. Typically, I am able to tackle the most complex problems myself, having had a reasonable Windows system administration and programming background.

Today, everything changed. A few hours ago, I ordered an 11-inch Macbook Air. I am both very excited about the decision and concerned about starting fresh and throwing away 26 years of hard-earned expertise.

I did not make the decision because I am an Apple groupie. This has been a pragmatic decision in the works for a couple of years. I think this decision is not unique to me, but reflects the bigger problem for Microsoft, one which I doubt they will be able to reverse. In fact, I think some of this is outside their control. I do not envy Steve Ballmer who needs to figure this mess out.

The trigger for the decision to move is my laptop, which is reaching the end of its life. It is starting to fail on me, which accelerated my decision regarding what my next laptop was going to be.

Key drivers and enablers for this decision:

- Timing: I had very specific hardware requirements – very lightweight, 12” or smaller screen, very long battery life (Intel Haswell) & powerful CPU, a.k.a. Core i7 (I have very large and complex Excel spreadsheets). I checked out Lenovo, Dell, ASUS and a number of other manufacturers. While there are a number of laptops which almost match those requirements it’s actually surprising how fast to market Apple was on this one. So timing and hardware availability did play a factor, but as you’ll see below, it is not the only reason.

- Software/hardware compatibility issues: Increasing frustration with software/hardware issues. Microsoft is not to blame for this, and it has become a lot better in recent years, but the iPad and iPhone definitely prove the value of a vertically integrated system. In a vertically integrated system, the software and hardware are tightly integrated. It just works! And if it doesn’t, then the problems impact everyone and are resolved faster and more effectively. In the Windows ecosystem, this heavily depends on the hardware OEMs, which has its challenges.

- Email and calendaring moving to the Web: A year ago, I mandated the company to move to Google Apps. The key business driver for that move was to improve our agility and enable IT to contribute more to adding value to the business vs. maintaining the existing infrastructure. The move was successful and, as a byproduct, reduced our dependence on the Windows platform.

- Applications moving to SaaS: Outside of Outlook and Excel, the browser has increasingly become the focus point, due to the move to SaaS-based application delivery. Salesforce.com, which is critical to me, is in the browser. Even Tweetdeck, which to-date was on my desktop, now has a great Web UI that actually works better for me than the desktop version. This is a change in application consumption that really is outside of Microsoft’s control. It will continue to erode the Windows value proposition. And as Microsoft has already lost the browser war, there’s no longer any dependency on Internet Explorer.

- Developers embracing the Mac: Mac OS X has become the Web developer’s OS. We live in a world that is increasingly dominated by open-source software and the cloud. That software is primarily targeted at Linux (& UNIX), and only after that at the Windows platform. Over the years, we have seen at the PHP conferences that the average PHP developer has moved from Windows to Mac. We literally see a change every year. Today, it seems that a majority of developers showing up at our conferences are on the Mac. I like the idea of being on the same page as a big part of our developer community. An added benefit is access to a native UNIX-like shell, as opposed to the grizzly cygwin Windows UNIX compatibility layer.

That summarizes some of the key reasons and enablers for moving from Microsoft to Apple. While you may or may not agree with some of these points, I think it’s clear that Microsoft is no longer solely in control of its own destiny. The adoption of SaaS, and the fact that we are becoming increasingly comfortable with other environments such as mobile devices and tables, reduces the angst and friction associated with moving away from Windows.

I don’t think I am unique and I don’t have any real good advice for Microsoft. However, I do think its cause for concern if your best technical users are leaving you – although I am not an investor guru – I would give it some serious thought if I were still a Microsoft shareholder.

Andi

This blog post should not be used as a basis for trading in the securities or loans of the companies named herein or for any other investment decision.

IBM Bundles Zend Server to Deliver Self-Service Enterprise PHP Platform on IBM SmartCloud!

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!

Zend Server 6 is launched and available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace

It’s been an incredibly busy and fruitful last few weeks at Zend. We released the newest version of Zend Server and Zend Studio last week, and the initial feedback has been phenomenal.

Zend Server 6 is the ideal application platform for mobile and web applications, and this version brings a new level of enterprise capabilities. In addition to a highly performing runtime environment and rich integration with the Zend Studio IDE, it includes a broad collection of features to help keep your applications running well, and assist both developers and IT operations in finding and resolving any production issues as quickly as possible.

Our team created a cool video which highlights some of Zend Server’s ability to enable scalability and development/operations collaboration. Also, eWeek published a good article on the announcement.

Today, I’m also pleased to share that this newest version of Zend Server is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Now, for one combined fee with Amazon Web Services, you can run your applications on a fully supported PHP application platform with Zend Server 6 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux.

The combination of Amazon’s supported Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Zend’s “best in class” application platform combine to make an ideal choice for running and managing mobile and web applications.

Some key capabilities of Zend Server 6 include Deployment Automation, Performance & Scalability, Monitoring & Root-Cause Analysis, Mobile-backend APIs, Support and much more! For a brief overview visit our Features page.

A complete “What’s New” for Zend Server 6 can be found on our Website.

To get started, visit either www.zend.com/server, or you can find the new Professional and Enterprise editions of Zend Server on AWS

Happy PHP’ing!

Mobile is Cloud and Cloud is Mobile

There is no arguing that the world has turned mobile. I believe that it is time for application developers to adopt a mobile-first mentality. In this post I’m going to outline what I believe that means, and how Zend intends to help developers and companies make mobile first a reality.

A mobile first approach is essential as mobile devices (including tablets) are quickly becoming the most popular access point for online interactions. A mobile-first mindset focuses on delivering a strong contextual and personalized experience. It embraces touch,  puts the user experience at the center and sets apps up to reach 100% of the mobile audience.

One of the most critical design principles of mobile first is that context is essential to today’s application development. In today’s mobile-first era, consumers, employees and partners want to take action in real time and base their decisions on the best actionable personalized information. Businesses want to engage customers in real time, because companies know that their ability to influence behavior increases significantly if they can meet their users in context. That context may include location, social graph, user profile and many other data points. For example, offers for a mortgage or car loan are most effective when delivered to a consumer at the exact point they are house or car shopping.

API-centric cloud services architecture

We believe the best architecture to support a mobile first paradigm is a REST/JSON-based, API-centric cloud services approach. The brain of the application sits on the server side and pulls together a variety of data sources which build the context and personalization for the app. PHP is ideally suited for this, as it has strong interoperability into existing enterprise systems and social platforms. PHP is also highly productive, and enables the agile development approach required to deliver iterative application value – a key requirement for user-centric development.

Cloud as the delivery vehicle

In mobile-first architectures, the cloud becomes the preferred delivery vehicle. The unpredictability of scale and latency in the mobile world require application platforms that can scale up and scale down on demand. In addition, the user-driven and iterative design approach of a mobile-first paradigm puts increased pressure on organizations to implement agile operations that enable them to frequently and incrementally deploy updated mobile apps. Cloud automation and application platforms best enable agile delivery and operations. Finally, contextual applications will access an increasing amount of SaaS applications and social platforms. The need for the integration of a variety of public cloud services will drive the runtime platforms into the cloud. We already see this trend emerging with cloud-based offerings by a variety of integration players.

UI logic moves to the client

On the front end, the experience needs to be tailored to the mobile device’s form factor and its native interaction paradigm. To enable a great user experience, the UI logic needs to move from the server side to the client side. The client-side UI logic focuses on delivering the right interaction paradigm while communicating with the server side for data access and processing via REST/JSON calls.

Mobile drives adoption of cloud

Mobile and cloud are increasingly interlinked and co-dependent. Market-wise, looking at the IT vendor landscape, there are companies that have made great progress in enabling mobile client development solutions; others have made significant progress in enabling the delivery of cloud services at scale. I believe many are making the mistake of seeing cloud and mobile as separate and their strategies reflect that. Others get that the two should work together, but these companies are too big to truly deliver a holistic solution; in such organizations, artificial org chart boundaries exist between end user computing and data center groups.

At Zend, we believe mobile and cloud are so interdependent that vendors who address one and not the other leave their customers short. We are stepping up to the challenge and are delivering on an end-to-end solution to make it easier to build these next generation cloud-connected mobile applications.

Zend’s solution to building cloud-connected mobile applications spans from client to cloud. Some of the key elements include:

-          Easy drag and drop creation of cloud services

-          An open cloud application platform that enables deployment to any cloud

-          Strong Web standards-based client-side tooling

Easy drag and drop creation of cloud services

In Zend Studio, we enable customers to visually assemble cloud services (a.k.a. APIs). The visual tooling is built on Zend Server Gateway, an API gateway. Zend Server Gateway is lightweight, enables authentication, filtering and validation, and a variety of other capabilities. We are investing in Zend Server Gateway to continue to round out its capabilities and ensure it is an easy and flexible way to build and deliver cloud services. Zend Studio also enables the connecting of these cloud services to the client- side UI in a very easy manner (see more below).

An open cloud application platform that enables deployment to any cloud

As mentioned earlier, the scalability and agility benefits of cloud make it the most appropriate back end delivery vehicle for a mobile-first strategy. Zend Server is pre-integrated with a variety of clouds including Amazon, RackSspace, VMware, IBM, Red Hat OpenShift and others. And we intend to continue to add additional support clouds, including Windows Azure and Google.

These cloud integrations enable one-click launch of our elastic PHP Cloud application platform. In order to meet the latency, scale and SLA requirements of cloud-connected mobile apps, Zend Server delivers fault tolerance, performance management, monitoring and alerting, and high performance. We also enable effective communication between development and operations departments via role-based access and automation, fostering a strong, agile, collaborative environment.

Strong Web standards-based client-side tooling

At Zend, we believe that open Web standards will end up dominating the client side. While today Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android are the norm, there is no doubt that HTML5 & JavaScript will unify mobile application development, just like they unified Web development for the desktop. There is much innovation going on around HTML5 and mobile devices, including significant investments in performance. So while it may not seem so today, it is only a matter of time before Web technologies will be in the lead. As a result, we have fully embraced HTML5 & JavaScript, and have deepened our commitment to these technologies in Zend Studio, our professional PHP IDE.

We have also integrated Apache Cordova (a.k.a. Phonegap) into our tooling experience. This will enable our customers to leverage open web standards technologies to build applications that have access to native device capabilities, such as the camera on a variety of OSs, including iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Applications packaged with Apache Cordova can also be distributed through the app stores. Therefore, you get all the distribution model benefits while being able to easily target multiple devices with your in-house Web developers.

What you see is what you get. Tooling saves time by giving you the ability to quickly put together mobile prototypes that may have taken days to develop manually. The visual drag and drop tooling generates standard HTML5 and jQuery Mobile, so the output can easily be understood and modified by all Web developers.

Developers can easily test their mobile applications using the provided Web mobile emulator. Integration with Android Development Toolkit (ADT), xCode (iOS) and Visual Studio (Windows Phone) enables a native emulator or target device experience, accessible directly from the Zend Studio IDE.

In summary, Zend is committed to supporting your entrance into the new era of contextual applications, where mobile is cloud and cloud is mobile. We believe we have a unique capability to deliver a complete, highly productive, yet enterprise-proven solution to address the requirements of building and running business-critical, cloud-connected mobile applications. And we do this without locking you into any specific cloud or mobile device. Sound too good to be true? Give it a try!

Red Hat and Zend Partner to Enable Enterprise PHP on Red Hat OpenShift PaaS

I’m pleased to share that Red Hat and Zend today announced a partnership and the immediate availability of Zend Server for Red Hat OpenShift. With this partnership Red Hat and Zend are joining forces to support professional PHP Cloud developers. A developer can now spin up a gear of Zend Server on the OpenShift platform as a service and instantly get access to a full ready to go enterprise class development environment. Even better, we’ve integrated this PHP platform as a service offering with Zend Studio, our industry leading IDE – meaning that a developer can deploy their app directly from Zend Studio to OpenShift in a few simple clicks.

Red Hat knows what it takes to make open-source software Enterprise-ready. They have shown leadership by taking open-source technologies like Linux and KVM and invested in productizing and supporting those technologies to make them not just viable but a strong alternative for Enterprise customers. With the acquisition of JBoss, Red Hat also entered the application development space. I believe through that experience Red Hat has learned that truly enabling Enterprise app development requires not just a basic runtime but much more. It requires productive and high quality workflows that span the application lifecycle, strong development tools & frameworks and industrial-strength runtimes that include strong management capabilities, performance, scalability, reliability and support.

Zend Server & Zend Studio bring to OpenShift PHP what JBoss brings to Openshift Java - an Enterprise-grade, end-to-end solution for building, deploying and managing business-critical applications. Or in other words – PHP done right for businesses. Even better, while Zend brings to the table a streamlined, industrial-strength way of doing PHP, Red Hat’s OpenShift streamlines a lot of additional application development requirements. For example, on OpenShift it is easy for developers to instantly get up and running with a Zend Server based environment in conjunction with the ability to instantaneously add additional components to their environment such as a MySQL or MongoDB server. It is the opportunity to focus the developers’ time on writing and debugging code as opposed to maintaining the development environment – which we at Zend make even more productive by providing great debugging tools and productivity enhancers as part of our Red Hat integration.

With this partnership we are extending the deployment options for our customer base. Red Hat OpenShift has unique capabilities which we believe many of our customers will find beneficial. With Red Hat’s public statement of intent to also bring Red Hat OpenShift to private Cloud we will see even greater opportunity for this partnership given both Zend & Red Hat will both deliver a consistent environment and management capabilities for deployment of apps across private and public cloud.

In two weeks from now we kick off ZendCon, our annual. Red Hat OpenShift is a major sponsor of the conference and will also be running a Hackathon at the conference. Zend also has a lot more news coming out at ZendCon around development of mobile apps and the next generation of our cloud management platform - much of it will also benefit the Zend solution on Red Hat OpenShift. So stay tuned and if you don’t have your passes yet then be sure to get them asap!

Happy PHPing!

Zend Framework 2 Released! Modular, Modern, Stellar!

In 2005 we announced the Zend Framework project. A great framework was the missing link in moving PHP from departmental to strategic Enterprise adoption. We had already delivered on the other necessary Enterprise requirements incl. broad database support, strong OO, XML and Web Services in PHP 5 and standard tooling via the Eclipse eco-system.

By delivering best-in-class best practices through a powerful application framework we knew we’d enable companies to scale-out their PHP development practices and as a result adopt PHP strategically, company-wide. To ensure we were on parity in maturity and completeness with other major solutions e.g. ASP.net we also ensured Zend Framework was fully integrated into our IDE(Zend Studio) and supported within our app server (Zend Server). In addition we build out certification, training and consulting services to support companies who were adopting Zend Framework.

Most important our goal was not to do this on our own. In order to be successful we knew we had to unlock the knowledge captured within the PHP community and our Enterprise partners e.g. IBM. As a result prior to announcement we recruited a variety of companies and independent software developers to help support Zend Framework out of the gate. Over the years the number of contributors to Zend Framework has exploded, and there’s no doubt that Zend Framework would not have become what it is today without the great group of contributors we have.

Zend Framework 1 was amazingly successful. Hundreds of thousands of companies are using it to build business-critical applications incl. some of the largest companies in the world. In fact it was so successful that people see Zend Framework synonymous to Zend even though we were originally best known for having created the Zend Engine (the kernel of PHP).

On the back of this great success, 2.5 years ago we chartered the Zend Framework team – under Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s leadership – to build out the next generation of Zend Framework. The charter was clear – leverage the successes, the learnings, advances in PHP 5.3 and new Web development patterns and team with the community to build the best Web application framework on the market. While our preference was to ease migration for Zend Framework 1 users we also agreed that we would break what needs breaking, in order to ensure we don’t deliver anything less than a modern A+ framework.

Today I am proud to announce that the Zend Framework community has released the much awaited GA version of Zend Framework 2. We are confident this is going to be a step function for the Web community and better enable the development of modern Web applications. The advances in Zend Framework 2 are too numerous to list but I am especially excited about its modularity, extensibility and fast growing group of contributors.

As a company we are all-in on Zend Framework 2 and plan to fully support it via our app server, IDE and service offerings. We also see additional opportunities to leverage Zend Framework 2 in supporting the creation of modern Cloud and Mobile apps and services but more on that in the coming months. One of the major themes at this year’s ZendCon will be Zend Framework 2 and we will have many opportunities for people to get up to speed with it. So do not miss this event!

I’d like to share my gratitude to everyone who has contributed to making this effort a reality with code, documentation, tools or by popularizing the project. This includes both our own internal Zend Framework team and the hundreds of community contributors. Thank you!

Now let’s build some modern Web apps!

VMware + Zend Partnership: Goodbye Virtualization; Welcome Enterprise Cloud

In recent years popular opinion suggested that the private cloud delivered more immediate cloud monetization opportunities as opposed to the public cloud which would take more time. Instead we’ve witnessed faster adoption of public clouds with Amazon and Rackspace leading the pack. While the private cloud opportunity is huge there has been slow migration to private cloud due to difficulties in implementation and enterprise priorities.

The majority of Zend’s enterprise customers have virtualized their on-premise workloads, however, very few have true self-serve, elastic private clouds. What makes a virtualized environment a private cloud versus plain old virtualization? I am sure everyone has a different definition. My own definition includes the following requirements:

a) Self-service environments that automate both infrastructure and application provisioning.

b) Out-of-the-box application lifecycle management from development to test to production delivering best practices in a turnkey fashion.

c) Strong application-level management capabilities. The app is what matters most. Can you deploy, monitor, and identify root-cause without having to concern yourself about the underlying infrastructure?

d) Auto-scaling and optimizing your applications’ runtime footprint aka elasticity. Will the environment automatically scale-up and scale-down the app while retaining its integrity and ensuring fault-tolerance?

We designed and built Zend Server, our PHP cloud Application Platform, with these key tenets in mind. We created a fully automated PHP runtime environment that is fast, elastic and dependable. Zend Server automates application deployment, monitoring and root-cause analysis, delivers elasticity in conjunction with fault tolerance and much more. Our vision is to be the de-facto standard enterprise-grade PHP runtime for cloud. We are well on the path to getting there. We have proven integrations with Amazon’s Cloud via Amazon CloudFormation; native support for IBM private and public cloud environments; many clouds via our Rightscale partnership including Rackspace and Citrix; and several additional ones in the pipeline (which we’ll be talking about in the coming months). Our partners share a joint vision with us around cloud application platforms and we are excited to work with them to bring that vision to life.

On that note, I am excited to announce a new partnership with VMware. VMware today is no doubt a proven leader in enterprise virtualization. The company is making a strong effort to enable its virtualized customer base’s transition from virtualization to private cloud. One of the key components to making that transition happen is VMware’s vFabric Application Director product (App Director). App Director delivers a very simple and visual drag and drop approach to defining the application environment as reusable blueprints. We have partnered with VMware to create such blueprints for Zend Server in a way that truly delivers on some of the aforementioned must-have private cloud characteristics including self-serve provisioning, elasticity and application-level management.

vFabric Application Director configuring an elastic, highly available Zend Server environment:

Probably most exciting is that VMware recognizes that the enterprise is heterogeneous and many will have more than one kind of cloud to which they will want to deploy. As a result VMware has built App Director to not only support on-premise VMware environments as well as direct provisioning to VMware based service providers and also non-VMware based clouds such as Amazon. Yes, I believe VMware realizes that in order to be a credible cloud management vendor they need to be open and deliver choice of deployment to enterprise customers.

Now let’s go back to Zend Server. Zend Server does exactly that for PHP. We deliver choice of deployment in the cloud by delivering a consistent enterprise-grade PHP cloud application platform in multiple cloud environments across private and public clouds. Combine VMware’s multi-cloud provisioning and management with Zend Server’s multi-cloud support and a very compelling value-proposition for enterprise application development and operations teams emerges. It’s truly a write once, deploy anywhere application platform that is turnkey, elastic, fault tolerant and managed.

VMware and other Zend partners are making big investments in the private cloud. And while we are still at the beginning of enterprise customers implementing true private clouds we have heard from most of them that it’s where they want to be. It’s an exciting time to be in IT, and to be developing enterprise apps with PHP.

Goodbye virtualization. Welcome cloud!

ZendCon wrap-up and welcome phpcloud.com!

We just wrapped up the 7th ZendCon event last week in Santa Clara, and the enthusiasm of the PHP community was inspiring. PHP is gaining momentum across industries and geographies, powering the web, helping people build amazing apps with ease, proficiency and creativity. In so many ways, PHP is making a difference, from legacy modernization to mobile app development and cloud deployments. And PHP is the basis for Drupal CMS, Magento e-commerce, Joomla and Wordpress, platforms used by millions of people. It is gratifying to see the innovation in our community, which is now about 5 million developers strong, and Zend is proud to be part of it, with the introduction of phpcloud.com – which is like a triple play in the cloud.

First up is Zend Developer Cloud, a sandbox where PHP developers can get started and develop great apps with no need to build a PHP stack or spend time maintaining a PHP environment. They’re literally just a few clicks away from productive coding in Zend Developer Cloud. This represents a step function in improved productivity similar to what Web application frameworks delivered 6 years ago. Unlike many other cloud platform providers, Zend is clearly placing a major emphasis on development, which is where we believe successful cloud initiatives begin, and where customers are investing time and resources for the greatest benefit.

Here, developers can really work together in the cloud, creating containers and snapshots of their app stacks so others can join a project in progress, and collaborate productively. Troubleshooting and enabling the development of high quality code is also a major focus and the Zend Developer Cloud provides powerful tools such as our code tracing technology, and browser integration to deliver proactive alerts while developers are writing and testing code. We want to cater to all PHP developers, who may use everything from vim to Zend Studio. For those who use Zend Studio, we’ve integrated it with Zend Developer Cloud to make the developer experience seamless. Like other editors or IDEs? The open source Zend SDK will enable Eclipse PDT and other tools to be integrated with Zend Developer Cloud.

Next up is production, where the Zend Application Fabric provides an elastic, highly available platform with a complete stack — PHP runtime, a full range of extensions, and Zend Framework. Zend Application Fabric is powered by Zend Server to provide the PHP application monitoring and code tracing that developers have come to rely on. The ability to find and fix issues quickly without having to recreate them means that precious time once spent on troubleshooting can be refocused on coding. And third is a strong partner ecosystem. For developers who work in the Zend Developer Cloud, their code will be ready to deploy to any cloud that supports the Zend Application Fabric. This includes partnering with Amazon Web Services, Rightscale, Rackspace and IBM SmartCloud today, and more to come. And, developed apps can also be deployed on-premise with Zend Server to take full advantage of automated on-premise deployment and delivery benefits.

As we enter this new era of productivity and choice for Web developers, Zend will continue to innovate and build on a fully integrated and seamless development experience, delivering the best, elastic application platform and working with a strong partner ecosystem to deliver a cloud runtime environment where and when you want it.

Happy PHP’ing!!

Easily build cross-platform, native mobile apps (iOS, Android, Blackberry)

Last month I blogged about the release of Adobe Flash Builder for PHP 4.5. Today Adobe released version 4.5.1 which completes last month’s launch with optimized iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Blackberry support!

It seems many people have been confused re: what iOS support really means. Let me clarify. This is not about when you’d choose Flash vs. HTML 5 in the browser. The product does support targeting Flash in the browser but what excites me the most is the availability of the Flex framework for delivering native mobile experiences on iOS, Android and other devices. It addresses one of the biggest pain points our customers have with mobility and I see no one else on the market addressing it in such a complete manner (although many are addressing various aspects of the problem).

Adobe has done a great job in making it dead simple to deliver native mobile apps.  They have delivered on strong IDE-based tooling, a very extensive application framework (Flex) and great runtime performance making it run at near native speeds on a broad range of devices. Best of all, the deep integration with PHP & Zend Studio enables us to deliver a strong client (Air)-server(PHP) development experience. All at really compelling price points!

So how does iOS support work? Adobe cross compiles to native ARM machine code. These apps are self contained, can be distributed via the Apple Store and perform well.

As mentioned earlier, today we are shipping 4.5.1 which completes iOS & Blackberry support. Get your 60 day trial - http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder-php.html

Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP is now available!

As I recently noted, we have teamed with Adobe to deliver a solution for developers to rapidly deliver native, connected mobile applications. This joint solution based on Adobe Flash Builder, Zend Studio and Adobe AIR enables users to use a common code base and target multiple devices including iOS, Android and Blackberry. Passed are the days where you have to learn Objective-C, Java and other native frameworks.

A recent research report noted that the # of Mobile app downloads will reach 44 billion by 2016. That coupled with the fact that Apple has already paid out over $2 billion to developers for apps sold on the App Store creates a compelling story for a solution that helps developers leverage Web skills and an easy to use visual builder to deliver internet connected applications across devices.

Check it out at Zend.com’s product page or Adobe.com’s product page.

Zend and RightScale Deliver a Customizable PHP PaaS: Deploy and Scale Industrial Strength PHP in the Cloud of Your Choice

The industry is going through a major reset as a result of Cloud Computing. Economies of scale, driven by public Cloud infrastructures in conjunction with pay-as-you-go pricing models, create a very strong motivating factor for companies to move more of their workloads into the Cloud. In addition, Cloud promises to deliver unprecedented agility and time-to-market which makes it all the more appealing.

Today, more than 35% of the Web workload runs on PHP (some believe it is closer to 55%). It is therefore not surprising that RightScale, the cloud management leader that powers the likes of Zynga, has reported that more than 37% of its customers are running PHP in the Cloud (PHP ranks as the #1 language among RightScale customers).

These synergies brought RightScale and Zend together in 2010, focused on delivering a best-of-breed PHP Cloud offering. At that time, we introduced the RightScale Zend Dev & Test Pack to enable PHP developers to get started quickly with a pilot project in the cloud. Today, we’re introducing the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack to deliver PHP for production in the Cloud.

We have aligned the development of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) with the needs of our existing and future customers, and defined key tenets for the Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform including:

- Multi-Cloud – We believe the market is looking for a consistent PHP application platform across multiple-cloud environments including public and private environments.

- Application Centricity – No matter what underlying resources are serving the application, the need for application-centric deployment and management is fundamental to how our customers want to run their workloads.

- Application Lifecycle – Achieving operational excellence and predictability requires strong consistency from development to testing to staging and production and a capable agile process to push new functionality into the market quickly.

- Portability – Cloud native applications should be fully portable across cloud infrastructures.

- Elasticity – Cloud platforms should automatically scale up and down, on-demand based on workload to ensure optimal user experience and help reduce infrastructure costs.

- Flexibility – Businesses have broadly varying workloads, business requirements and application preferences. We want to ensure users can customize their platform to fit their business needs.

RightScale’s experience in Cloud and Zend’s experience in PHP combine to deliver the most pragmatic and broadly applicable PHP platform that ensures success for customers who want to develop and deploy fault-tolerant, scalable and manageable PHP infrastructures in the Cloud.

The following are some examples of how we jointly address the above tenets with RightScale providing the infrastructure management capabilities and Zend focusing at the application development layer:

- Multi-cloud – RightScale is a multi-cloud management platform. While Amazon has been the focus, by year-end RightScale will, at minimum, have added support for the Rackspace Cloud and Cloud.com. Zend, in turn, will deliver a completely consistent PHP experience across these multiple Cloud environments.

- Portability – RightScale enables portability of infrastructure recipes and management such as load balancers, the Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform, database and other infrastructure components across multiple Cloud environments. Zend leads the Simple Cloud API project, which enables portability at the application level.

- Elasticity – RightScale has experience in monitoring and scaling-up applications that run on thousands of servers, including the provisioning and managing highly available infrastructure components. This tweet exemplifies how RightScale scaled-out a Web site to meet peak demand. Zend, too, has expertise in delivering scalable and highly-available fault-tolerant PHP environments for customers including NYSE Euronext, GE, BNP Paribas and others. Our platform supports scale up and down in the Cloud and addresses configuration, fault tolerance and other important aspects of elastic environments.

Through tight integration of RightScale and Zend technologies, with a click of a button, customers can launch highly-available virtual PHP infrastructures that include HA load balancing, HA MySQL and HA Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform (powered by 8 virtual servers). It is very cool stuff and really exemplifies the promise of cloud computing.

Our PaaS solution enables customers to ‘lift the hood’ and tweak the templates behind these infrastructures. For example, a development team may want to use Oracle in their cloud platform. They can easily use RightScale’s capabilities to add an Oracle setup to their template. This does not change the fact that a full infrastructure can be launched on the Cloud of their choice with the click of a button and it is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Need one of these setups for staging? Click a button to get an identical environment for staging. Deploy a new application version in staging, test, and if all is well, deploy to an identically configured production environment. Another click of the button and the staging environment goes away until a new one is needed. It’s cost-effective and agile PaaS, without compromising architectural and operational excellence. Exactly what businesses need when running critical applications in the Cloud.

 

 

At Zend we are very excited about Cloud Computing. We believe it is a game changer and by delivering an elastic, customizable PaaS built with architectural excellence and multi-cloud in mind, we are able to help our customers get the maximum benefit out of Cloud whether public or private.

The RightScale and Zend joint offering is production-ready, generally available and can be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis from both RightScale and Zend.

And this is just the beginning. We are working on several additions to the platform including robust application deployment (not far off) and other initiatives that will continue to accelerate onboarding and ensure operational excellence in production.

Thanks to our friends at RightScale who’ve done a phenomenal job in working with us to integrate and harden the platform. It’s been a pleasure!

Happy PHP’ing!