TMCnet News

IBM System i Community Galvanizes Around PHP
[April 30, 2007]

IBM System i Community Galvanizes Around PHP


CUPERTINO, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, today announced the broad adoption of Zend products by an ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISV) and customers that make up the IBM System i community. PHP, the open source development language used to create over 20 million websites, is backed by a global community of over 4.5 million developers. Attracted to its ease-of-use and flexibility, users of the flagship operating system for System i, i5/OS, are using PHP to modernize legacy applications and create new web applications.



Over the past year, Zend and IBM have worked together to make Zend's popular PHP products available for V5R3 and V5R4 versions of i5/OS. Zend Core for i5/OS is a fully tested and enhanced version of open source PHP; Zend Platform for i5/OS is a PHP production environment that improves application management and performance; and Zend Studio for i5/OS is a PHP Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that includes all of the components necessary to support the lifecycle of PHP applications created on i5/OS.

"We entered into this relationship with Zend to bring the System i and PHP communities together, enabling our customers to quickly adapt to new challenges and opportunities while leveraging their current investments and assets," said Mark Shearer, general manager IBM System i. "One benefit our customers are seeing is the ability to develop and put applications into production very quickly, sometimes within a few weeks. As today's announcement shows, System i clients see the value of PHP on i5/OS."


Over 5,000 individuals in 150 countries have downloaded Zend Core for i5/OS, Zend Platform for i5/OS and Zend Studio for i5/OS. Here are some of the many small and medium-size businesses that have adopted PHP and Zend on the i5/OS platform.

-- Parts Depot created an order management application that introduced new efficiencies into its retail operations.

-- Cremer, a global manufacturer of medical supplies, created new applications to support its call center operations that reduced costs and streamlined the customer experience.

-- FSIP, a manufacturer of electric vehicle controls, utilized a wireless bar coding application that was created with PHP and cut project costs by 50 percent.

-- MedDirect, a specialty healthcare finance company, built a new web portal in four weeks that lets users access and fully manage their accounts.

-- ICS, an IT solutions provider, leveraged the object oriented capabilities in PHP 5 to create a maintenance contract workflow system that streamlined the process of creating and managing customer agreements. ICS is the winner of the Zend PHP Innovation Challenge for their innovative use of Zend Core for i5/OS.

"In my opinion, anyone that picks a route other than Zend's PHP solution for web enabling their applications on the System i is making a big mistake," said Robin D. Colles, vice president of information technology for MedDirect.

Several ISVs have released their own versions of software optimized for use with PHP. "The domination of PHP in e-commerce applications is staggering, so the decision to develop a PHP connectivity option for Curbstone's Payment Server was an easy one," said Curbstone president Ira Chandler.

-- Curbstone added a PHP connectivity option to its Payment Server that speeds credit card authorizations.

-- HarrisData is introducing new PHP functionality in their enterprise application to capture the benefits of rapid web development, and allow customers to utilize their own PHP skills and applications in conjunction with HarrisData software.

-- BCD Software created a new version of its flagship product, WebSmart PHP, used to build web-based applications.

This week, Zend is participating in the COMMON 2007 Annual Conference & Expo, the world's largest gathering of IBM midrange computing users and solution providers. Fifteen individual COMMON 2007 sessions are devoted to building, testing, deploying and managing PHP applications on the i5/OS platform. For a complete schedule of COMMON sessions visit http://www.common.org/conferences/2007/annual/.

About Zend Technologies, Inc.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]