Zend Taps System i-PHP Guru, Pushes the i Platform

[sarose]

In its efforts to pump up the use of PHP for enterprise applications
running on the i platform, Zend Technology has announced that it has
hired a long-time PHP-on-i advocate, Mike Pavlak, to be part of the
Zend team, helping get i shops moving toward deploying PHP for
creating new applications and modernizing old ones for the Web. Zend
has also hired other i-specific sales and channel managers, and has
announced two new partnerships with players in the i ecosystem.

Pavlak, as many of you know, was formerly the IT director at Tripp
Lite, a Chicago-based maker of uninterruptible power supplies, surge
suppressors, power distribution units, and other power-related
equipment. Pavlak has 20 years of experience with information
technology and 15 years experience with the OS/400 and successor
platforms. Pavlak has also been heavily involved with the OMNI user
group in the Chicago area as well as the OCEAN user group in Southern
California; he has also been on the COMMON Americas Advisory Council
and was also on the Zend-COMMON Advisory Council, which Zend founded
with COMMON last year to specifically gather PHP-on-i requirements and
to fulfill those requirements. He was also an early and enthusiastic
proponent of getting PHP ported to the OS/400 and then i5/OS platform,
which is one of the reasons Zend is interested in hiring Pavlak in the
first place.

Pavlak is now moving to the other side of the IT bargaining table as a
customer sales engineer at Zend, which wants to boost the deployment
of PHP among i shops and to drive up sales of add-on products to the
Zend Core PHP engine that IBM is providing for free to OS/400 V5R3, i5/
OS V5R4, and i 6.1 shops. You can check out Pavlak's first blog post
at Zend at at this link, which is where he will be communicating with
the larger i community in addition to speaking engagements at user
groups and sales meetings.

"Before joining Zend, I was a passionate advocate for PHP on the IBM
Power i server," Pavlak explains in his post. "Now, I actually get
paid to follow my passion! How cool is that? The real point I’d like
to make here is that if you don't think PHP is ready for enterprise,
then guess again. Zend is delivering and I just bet my career on it."

To help push sales of those add-on Zend products, which can cost a
pretty penny--especially compared to a freebie PHP engine--Zend has
hired Ann Crichton as national accounts manager for i5/OS and i sales,
and Scott Dahlgren as national channel manager for the platform.

An interesting PHP-on-i aside to show you that the combination is
showing up in all kinds of places. Sandia National Laboratory is one
of the largest supercomputer centers in the world. A lot of
experimental, cutting-edge supercomputing gear gets put through the
paces first at Sandia. The massively parallel ASCI-Red Pentium-II
supercomputer built by Intel went into Sandia, and so did the "Red
Storm" behemoth created by Cray that is the foundation of the current
XT4 and XT5 Opteron-based massively parallel supers. The "Thunderbird"
Xeon-InfiniBand cluster built by Dell is also at Sandia. As it turns
out, the Sandia Laboratory Federal Credit Union, which is in essence a
bank for Sandia and a slew of hundreds of employers who work with the
lab providing it goods and services, runs its financial applications
on none other than an i platform, and it has just recently moved the
Web front end for its applications from CGIDEV2 to PHP. (With all that
brain power and iron, you would never think that Sandia would have an
i platform doing its books, but it just goes to show you that the
application drives the platform choice--and always has.)

Zend also announced last week that it has inked a formal partnership
with Key Information Systems, the IBM system reseller of Woodland
Hills, California, that has a substantial System i, System p, and
System x presence in Southern California and covers the western United
States and which has been blazing the trail for native Voice over IP
(VoIP) implementations on the System i platform. Zend also announced
an i-related partnership with CMA Technology Solutions, reseller that
spans the Gulf Coast region that is located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
CMA is a reseller of IBM's entire server product line (including
System z mainframes) and is also a certified Microsoft solution
provider, just as is Key Information Systems. Both companies are going
to be working with Zend to help i shops make the move to PHP.

That task has been made much easier with Zend Platform for i5/OS V3.6,
which is an add-on to the Zend Core PHP engine that provides code
acceleration, content caching, session clustering, job queues, SNMP
integration, reporting, output compression, a Java bridge, and other
management features that a production PHP application environment
needs--and, with V3.6, a 5250 Bridge that links green-screen apps into
PHP-driven Web pages.

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh060908-story03.html