By Cynthia Flash,
Zend Technologies, a company whose founders helped develop the open source server scripting language PHP, on Monday released the first applications designed to run with the free language.
Taking a cue from Linux resellers like Red Hat Inc. (stock: RHAT) and Caldera Systems Inc. (stock: CALD), Zend Technologies Ltd. officials said they hope their new Web application infrastructure products will help PHP compete with the more popular JavaScript from Netscape and Active Server Page technology from Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT).
In addition to selling a commercial version of PHP, Zend is releasing a PHP caching product, a PHP encoder, and a PHP development environment of developer tools. With PHP already used on nearly 4 million websites and on 33 percent of all Apache servers, Zend officials hope their new products will help PHP grow faster than its current rate of 15 percent per month.
"We're providing support services for PHP, but [also] a lot of the other extensions, capabilities, and enhancements to PHP that commercial and enterprise level companies want," said Zend chief technology officer Jim Jagielski. "Each of the 4 million users is a potential Zend customer in one way or another."
Mark Driver, Internet and e-business technologies research director at GartnerGroup, said Zend's technology should appeal to the open source community.
"For those organizations [that] are committed to open source technology, like Apache and Linux, PHP is very attractive," Driver said. "It's part of a larger, comprehensive open source strategy."
But he said PHP will never gain the market share or popularity of Microsoft's ASP or JavaScript. Instead, Zend will have to focus on the niche markets that are committed to open source products.
"It still ends up being a technology driven through the open source fervor rather than being viewed [as] a viable corporate technology, where there's already ASP," Driver said. "It doesn't mean they have to topple Microsoft to be successful. They could be very successful at No. 3 or 4."
Jean Christophe Cimetire, CEO and lead analyst at Burlington, Mass., researcher TechMetrix Research, has higher hopes for PHP and Zend's chances of capitalizing on the market.
"They're in a good position to transform PHP from a pure open source project to a very reliable and professional solution which can be used for enterprise applications," Cimetire said. "Zend provides a lot of features which makes it easy to develop PHP applications, and more importantly, which makes it easy to deploy and use PHP for critical applications."
Retailer Restoration Hardware and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway rely on PHP on their websites. Some 40 percent of online auction service provider Auctionwatch's website is written in PHP.
The site, which services eBay Inc. (stock: EBAY) and Amazon.com Inc. (stock: AMZN), started using Zend's new cache product in the fall. Since then, it's helped Web pages load faster and has saved Auctionwatch from buying new servers, said Ben Margolin, engineering director of seller tools and services.
"Before we were using cache, every page would have to be completely interpreted before it would run," MArgolin said. "It decreases memory consumption on the servers and pages load faster. The cache is a must-have for production in PHP."
For Zend's products to really catch on, Cimetiere said, they need more large websites to think the way Margolin does.
"If they can shore up with big customers using PHP for huge websites, it would help," he said.
Reach freelance writer Cynthia Flash at cynthia@flashmediaservices.com.
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