That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

While there are five million PHP developers around the globe, only some small fraction of them pay Zend for its server and IDE tools that make PHP sites faster, better, more debuggable, and more maintainable.

So Andi Gutmans, Zend CEO and one of the original fathers of the PHP programming language, is going freemium.

Zend Server version six, released yesterday, includes new features that automate deployment, make debugging much easier and faster — especially when bugs are a result of the inevitable differences between production, staging, and development environments — and proactive application monitoring tools that help developers and ops teams optimize running applications.

But the free version could really help propel Zend into a more prominent position in the average PHP developer’s toolkit.

Zend Server 6, free edition, helps developers who want advanced debugging and performance metrics in development states. It’ll help optimize server performance, run code traces for advanced debugging, and even assist in deploying your application to a live server. But of course, it is freemium, and has what Zend calls “limited production capabilities” and will only keep performance metrics for a short period of time.

Zend is, of course, hoping that the first-hit-is-always-free strategy will lead to more developers buying the whole stack to get all the goodies in production as well as development.

And there are some goodies:

“Within three days of our first site launch, Zend helped us optimize performance by more than 200 percent,” Robert Kerner, Chief Digital Officer of NYSE Euronext, said in a statement.

When I chatted to Zend’s Elaine Lennox and Andi Gutmans about the new version, they said the main goal of the new version was improving speed of deployment and maintenance of web apps.

“We’re helping app developers solve their problems,” Lennox said. “These days we see a very rapid release cycle … Facebook, for example, releases software multiple times per day, and more than half of enterprises are releasing several times a week.”

In those extremely rapid scenarios, teams don’t have time to waste finding bugs that need fixing. Lennox said that 70 percent of the time spending fixing bugs is actually spent just finding the problem, and that Zend 6′s new features would significantly reduce that waste.

“Whether you’re deploying in the cloud or on premise, a lot of the problems are the same,” Gutmans said. “So you want to have a very high level of automation.”

With the new software, developers can now write a script to deploy apps to production which ops staff can run, significantly cutting deployment time and problems. And they have “instant ability” to see the app’s behavior in the wild, get safe access to the production system in a read-only manner, and run code-tracing to see, line-by-line, what’s happening.

“It proactively monitors the application, and code tracing acts like a flight recorder, providing root-cause diagnostics so we can resolve issues quickly and definitively,” NYSE Euronext’s Kerner said. “In one example, Zend Server helped us resolve a problem related to SSL in our replicated environment that might otherwise have gone undetected.”

All of which sounds good, especially when some of it is available for free. One other bonus? The new environment is available, by default, through Amazon, Redhat, and other cloud service providers.

“There’s a lot of pressure in companies to deliver mobile, cloud-enabled apps,” Gutmans told me. “We’re getting used more and more by companies that traditionally used Java, and realized that Java just cannot perform this … we believe we have all the necessary components on the cloud and client side to help companies win.”

photo credit: pvera via photopin cc

These days, most companies are releasing software multiple times a week. In fact, according to Zend CMO Elaine Lennox, for “born-on-the-web” companies, this release cycle is several times a day. In that speedy environment, you don’t want to spend a lot of time bugfixing.

In, fact, you can’t afford to.

One of the most common source of problems is coordination between those who build and those who provision: development and operations. Different operating environments, lack of automation, and complex deployment procedures cause challenges between the two groups: 56 percent of teams have built apps that work just find in testing environments, but fail in production environments.

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

So Zend will be releasing a new version of its Zend Server and Zend Studio next week that, it says, will bridge the gap between development and operations. I chatted to Andi Gutmans, CEO and one of the original authors of the almost-ubiquitous PHP language, and Lennox yesterday.

“There’s a lot of pressure in companies to deliver mobile, cloud-enabled apps,” Gutmans says. “Half of teams are telling us that that they’ve missed dates because they cannot work together.”

Not working together causes bugs, and compounds the issues when bugs actually arise. According to Zend, 70 percent of the time for “fixing bugs” is actually spent in just finding the problem. Only 30 percent of developers’ time is spent solving it.

The new Zend Server 6 is designed to eliminate that 70 percent.

“The differences between development and live environments only get worse over time,” Lennox told me. “The development side doesn’t have visibility into errors in production, so the first step to fixing problems is to recreate the development environment from 3 months ago. We’ve seen teams literally waste weeks simply trying to reproduce issues.”

When that happens, people get upset. In numbers Lennox cited, 75 percent of developers say that operations is a “roadblock.” And, since one bad turn deserves another, 72 percent of operations engineers say that development is “not supportive of their goals.”

The fix?

Gutmans isn’t revealing just now what Zend is doing to solve the issue, except that Zend Server 6 will provide ”the tools, processes and infrastructure to enable teams to streamline and simplify their collaboration.”

More on that next week.

photo credit: e_monk via photopin cc

Yesterday, Zend announced that the new version of Zend Studio will lead to what Gutmans calls ‘cloud-connected mobile’ apps.

In the updated development environment, you can simultaneously create server-side code, integrate web services, communicate with legacy infrastructure … and design and build native mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, all in the same project.

I chatted with him today at ZendCon.

VentureBeat: How many years have you been working on PHP?

Andi Gutmans: Since 1997. I guess that’s about 15 years. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I realized that, yes, I am actually older now.

VentureBeat: You’re now the CEO of Zend, of course. Do you still contribute any source code?

Gutmans: Not too much … not actively. My main contribution is that I still do review source code. We’re still the key maintainers of PHP to this day. So my only real engineering meeting is on the Zend engine.

VentureBeat: You’re one of the still fairly rare developers who became and is still his company’s CEO. Talk to me about that transition.

Source: John Koetsier

Zend Studio, creating a mobile app.

Gutmans: It actually happened about three and a half years ago, fairly recently. Originally, we [Gutmans and co-founder Zeev Suraski] had no aspirations to run the business. So we brought in a CEO.

When he left, I was the number two, and still had no aspirations, so we recruited another one. But then I moved to Silicon Valley. I became a more outgoing CTO and started meeting partners much more frequently. I basically transitioned to biz dev, and between 2004 and 2009, I was almost a member of the marketing team.

I won’t tell you what they used to call me!

It sort of happened naturally, between 2004 and 2009. I think it’s important to really understand where the market is — this is a very technically driven filed — and over time I built a business sense and become more effective at making deals.

Then in 2009 the board reached out to me and asked me to take the leadership role. It still wasn’t my plan, but they wanted a founder focus and a strong focus on product – we had started to do too much services. So what I’ve done over the past three years is move the company from 20 percent of revenue on runtime (software sales) to 70 percent today.

And we’re profitable today — it was a big step up for the company.

The one skill I benefited from from being an engineer was my Excel ability. We have a volume business, and the ability to analyze the business becomes more and more important. Sure, it’s 50 percent data and 50 percent gut, but the data is important.

It’s a tough job — there are always moments of regret – but it’s been great. Being a CEO is not easy. I really liked Ben Horowitz’ article on making yourself a CEO.

Source: Cal Evans - http://www.flickr.com/photos/calevans/2071724366/

The PHP elephant

VentureBeat: PHP 5 was released in 2004, now we’re on 5.4. Is development slowing down, do you have less to do, or are point releases actually incorporating more functionality?

Gutmans: It’s a balancing act. There are constantly new versions coming out as we see some of the best practices around frameworks, for example in 5.3 support for closures.

On the one hand, you have to be careful you don’t add too many new features. PHP is such a huge community you want it to be stable, but you need to find a balance between being stable and not bloated, but also bringing in new features.

One area that we’re always working on is performance: There’s always more work being done on the engine to find speed improvement.

VentureBeat: When can we expect 6.0? What’s on the road map for that?

Gutmans: There isn’t a road map right now – the PHP community doesn’t always have timetables. 5.5 is being worked on, but the decision on when it’s 6 or 5.5 is based on number of features we’re adding.

And our preference is to keep backward compatibility, too.

VentureBeat: You’ve talked a lot about “cloud-connected mobile apps.” What do you mean by that, and what does that mean for the apps of the future?

Gutmans: We all see how user interaction is moving to mobile first, and by that we mean phones, tablets, and touch, which demand a new interaction paradigm. What’s changing is that the use cases for how you consume services and how you interact change, and that has implications for how you build not only your client side but also your server side.

That’s why I say “cloud-connected-mobile” and not just mobile.

It’s not just about the client, it’s about the services that the client consumes. Business logic runs on the server side, and now the cloud services … they need to tailor to this new interaction paradigm.

VentureBeat: Fast-forward five years. Where is PHP, and where is Zend?

Gutmans: We think PHP has a unique opportunity to be the enterprise standard for web development and mobile.

With the agility and the speed and the interoperability that you need when developing … that is where PHP has a sweet spot. The incumbents like Java and .Net have a tough road. Java, in my opinion, is too heavy a solution and too slow, and .Net has issues because cloud is less Windows-centric.

And the new players, Ruby for example, don’t have the enterprise support that we’ve built over the years for PHP.

So there’s a really great opportunity for PHP to capture those new apps that are being built. You’re still going to have Java forever on the backend.

On the client side … I believe web technologies will ultimately win. As we see mobile take over … you’ll see increased fragmentation, so the web will increasingly be the platform. I think that will happen within 3-5 years.

The main barrier today is probably Apple.

I don’t think it’s going to be a sustaining strategy for them – over time they will have to open up to the web. Right now, Apple is not enabling us today to do mobile apps in the most high performance way … they’re not giving us access to APIs that you can get on Android.

They state security is the reason, but I think they’re trying to create some roadblocks to having an optimized web experience and to protect the objective-C ecosystem.

I’m still a big fan of their devices, though. [He pulls out a iPhone 4S.]

VentureBeat: Are you planning to get an iPhone 5?

Gutmans: I don’t know. Probably not. I do intend to get an iPad mini, however, to replace my first-generation iPad.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

Yesterday at ZendCon, Andi Gutmans unveiled new capability in Zend Studio to build “cloud-connected mobile apps.” The latest version of Zend Studio helps developers create web services, intelligent mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and even your app’s user interface, all in one connected, simplified development environment. In fact, I watched Zend’s Kent Mitchell do it in about 10 minutes.

“It’s pretty cool,” IBMs’ Ryan Watkins told me last night at a ZendCon reception. “It definitely makes it look easy.”

Princeton University’s Henry Umansky, who builds internal web applications for the university’s staff and students, was even more effusive.

“It looks impressive! I think it will be a complete paradigm shift in the way people develop for mobile first,” he said. “And it’s excellent for rapid prototyping. The stakeholders for our projects are generally very visual people.”

The new Zend Studio integrates Cordova, the open-source project better known as PhoneGap, to help developers launch native apps for multiple mobile platforms from a single codebase. That’s what was attractive to Quicken Loan‘s Jim Starr.

“Our developers want to write once and deploy everywhere,” he told me. “I’m intrigued by that.”

Another developer, who didn’t want to be named as he did not have permission to speak for his company, was cautiously optimistic, saying that though he didn’t develop much for mobile at the moment, “things are shifting that way.”

A number of developers I spoke to were, like him, cautiously examining the idea of being able to develop for mobile — almost like a child with a new toy that he or she has not yet determined is fun or scary. For many PHP developers, it seems, the transition from back-end server-side development to new user-interface-centric mobile development is a bit of a leap.

One thing that might be interesting from a Zend point of view: developers who use PHP but don’t use Zend might now be convinced to use Zend’s development stack: Studio, Server, and so on.

“It looks pretty cool. I haven’t used Zend Studio yet,” said Dru Spackman, who builds in the NetBeans IDE but is now considering a change.

photo credit: CalEvans via photopin cc

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

New: watch a PHP developer create a native mobile app in 10 minutes.

This morning at ZendCon, Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans announced that Zend Studio 10 will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps right from the language they know best, PHP. The new capability includes a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project’s Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration so developers can publish native app packages to the various app stores.

Zend CEO Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

This is a major game-changer for PHP developers, who until now have been shut out of the mobile app revolution. Apps for iPhone and iPad are coded in Objective-C, while apps for Google’s Android mobile operating system are built in Java. This new announcement means that millions of new developers have just been invited to the mobile development party.

“We’re the only vendor that is really taking a really strong approach on this,” Gutmans told me last week in a sneak preview. “This is a seamless development experience.”

This new capability, Gutmans said, allows developers to build out backend code and front-end interface at the same time. That’s actually the hard part, according to Zend SMO Elaine Lennox.

“Modern apps connect to multiple different back-end systems such as CRM systems, cloud services, and social networks. With all these different data services in lot of different places, wiring them together can be harder to build than the app,” she said. “But now, a developer can go into Zend studio, create the front-end with a WYSIWYG interface builder, and connect it all on the backend.”

But it’s not just about mobile.

Instead, Gutman’s vision is about two massive revolutions: mobile and cloud. The new Zend Server is built for cloud, whether developers use Amazon, Rackspace, Windows Azure, or other clouds. In the new development architecture, apps access clouds, which then access APIs, social services, or SaaS options such as Salesforce.

“We’re giving you a common workflow between client and cloud for building mobile apps,” Gutmans told me. “We’re defining a new architecture: cloud service architecture. I think it’s completely a first … I haven’t seen it before.”

Source: Zend

Zend’s view of the mobile app

Andi Gutmans, who is also one of the primary authors of the PHP language, had hinted at new mobile options for PHP developers to VentureBeat three weeks ago.

Zend and PHP have made significant inroads into the enterprise market in the last few years — Gutmans told me that “when we go up against Java or .Net, we win — and the new integrated development environment for mobile, cloud, and business applications is part of a new mobile-first push for the company.

Citing a study saying that mobile development projects will outnumber PC-focused projects by four to one, and that the world will have 7.4 billion mobile devices by 2015, Gutmans wants to help enterprises create “composite” apps, apps that combine intelligence from internal business systems, external networks and applications, and personalizations to individual users.

The new Zend Studio will allow drag-and-drop connection to various cloud services as well as the visual creation of mobile interfaces, allowing developers to manage all the components of development for complex, connected mobile apps up in one interface.

“We’re bringing mobile and cloud together,” Gutmans said.

And that’s going to give PHP developers — and PHP-using enterprises — a massive new opportunity to use familiar tools to create new experiences for users in the office, and out.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

The key words being until now.

ZendCon, the big PHP conference, is coming up next week in Santa Clara, Calif. And Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans is planning on unveiling some major news about how his company is going help the world’s five million PHP developers — a third of whom are in his database — build for both mobile and cloud.

Today I chatted with Gutmans for a sneak preview, getting a few more details than I did three weeks ago.

“This is a very unique time in information technology history,” Gutmans said. “There are a lot of disruptions happening right now.”

He’s talking about the revolution in mobile, cloud services, and social that we’ve seen take over the technology world. Undoubtedly, PHP has been huge in social — it is, after all, the language in which Facebook is created — and huge in web content, with the world’s leading blogging services (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more) all created in PHP. The reality is, however, that PHP has not been huge in mobile, where coders write Java to create Android apps and Objective-C to build iPhone and iPad apps. Nor has it had a strong, defined story in cloud services.

But things change.

Change means disruption, and disruption requires agility, Gutmans told me today. That’s exactly what he’s planning to demonstrate Oct. 23 onstage at ZENDcon, when he delivers the keynote address. And that agility means taking PHP beyond where it’s ever been before.

Far, far beyond.

“The biggest changes in technology are how mobile and cloud are converging,” says Gutmans. “Our intention is to tackle both of those head-on for our users.”

Mobile apps require a much more focused attention to users and usability. And we’re seeing mobile apps getting more and more sophisticated, Gutmans says, aggregating data from multiple systems — often cloud services — to deliver top-notch user experiences.

The new version of Zend Studio and Zend Server, plus another as-yet-unannounced tool, are intended to make PHP a big deal in both mobile and cloud development. That’s big news for PHP developers worldwide. And it makes me wonder: What will five million new mobile developers (minus some fraction who probably already also code for mobile) be able to create?

“You’re going to see a lot more from ZEND in the mobile space than you’ve seen before,” Gutmans promised.

Stay tuned!

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