IBM has announced an agreement with Zend Technologies to develop the industry's first integrated solution designed to help developers build and deploy applications and services based on PHP hypertext preprocessor (HTML-embedded scripting) web language.
Zend and its founders Doron Gerstel, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, are the architects of PHP, an open source environment which is used by more than fifteen million Web sites and has quickly become one of the most popular languages for building dynamic Web applications.
Zend, founded in 2000, and headquartered in Cupertino, California, is privately held and venture funded. Last month, the comany raised $10 million in venture capital from Azure, Index, Intel Capital, Platinum, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel.
Under the agreement, IBM will work with Zend to create 'Zend Core for IBM'. The companies stated that Zend Core for IBM would be the industry's first out-of-the-box, PHP development and production environment, featuring seamless integration with IBM's Cloudscape database server and DB2 Universal Database. Zend Core for IBM will be available in the second quarter of 2005 as a free download.
IBM noted that the agreement further expands its investment in open source by helping developers more effectively create applications based on the technology of their choice. IBM stated that the collaboration "reinforces IBM's commitment to the open source community and foundations such as Linux, Apache and Eclipse. IBM will introduce a new optimized native extension for Cloudscape and DB2 within the PHP community".
IBM and Zend are also jointly working on furthering PHP technology to include improved high-level database integration frameworks and enhanced PHP web services standards.
According to research firm Netcraft, PHP currently accounts for more than 40% of the overall web scripting language market.
"Our partnership with IBM further cements PHP as the language of choice for business-critical web applications," said Zend Technologies president and CEO Gerstel.
IBM will become the first vendor in the industry to support both major web development languages (PHP and Java), with an integrated database solution.
IBM Information Management general manager Janet Perna stated, "IBM will continue to work with Zend and the PHP open source community on future technologies that further the adoption of service-oriented application (SOA) technologies such as web services and XML."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on Sunday, February 27, 2005