[ossig] Zend Raises $20 Million

[Ditesh Kumar]

>From http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2006/082806-zend.html

The PHP company plans to expand professional services, web application
framework development, and the European sales force.

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 08/28/06

PHP development and support company Zend Technologies Inc. announced
today that it has raised $20 million in series D venture capital
funding. Andi Gutmans, Zend's chief technology officer and a co-founder
of the company, said in an interview Friday that top priorities for the
new investment are Eclipse integration, the Zend Framework for web
applications, and the company's services organization and European sales
force. 

Greylock Partners, a new Zend investor, led the funding round, and
current investors Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital,
Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital
are also participating, the company announced. 

Gutmans said Zend is planning to continue expanding its services
organization, with an emphasis on high-level architecture and training.
And the company plans to expand its sales force, especially in Europe,
he added. 

A growing services organization is needed as PHP grows from mainly
powering public-facing web sites to use in more business applications,
said Mark de Visser, Zend's chief marketing officer. "The big banks are
all deploying the same type of technology," he said. The Zend web site
lists German financial customers Onvista, wallstreet:online, Deutsche
Bank, and Dresdner Bank. 

The widely-used PHP language is a contender in a feature race with hot
newcomer Ruby and the newly resurgent Java. The Asynchronous JavaScript
And XML (AJAX) programming style, in which JavaScript code on a web page
connects back to the server to change the content of a web page without
reloading the whole page, is a key area. Ruby's Ruby on Rails framework
and Google's Google Web Toolkit for Java already offer built-in AJAX for
applications that use those languages on the server side.

Version 6 of PHP will offer improved XML support and improve the process
of developing AJAX applications, Gutmans said. "We're most likely going
to be integrating Dojo," he said. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit to
simplify the often time-consuming process of writing cross-browser
JavaScript, needed for AJAX applications. 

Zend is working with IBM on PHP support for Eclipse, Gutmans said.
Zend's Eclipse-based Zend Studio offers integrated development
environment features, as well as increasing amounts of HTML design
functionality, he said. "We're working toward a visually toolable
environment so people can drag and drop components, write their business
logic, and not have to worry too much about AJAX. They will still
ultimately need to know a bit of JavaScript," he said. 

"We are looking to staff up the Zend Framework team," Gutmans said. Zend
Framework, still in development, is a web development which Gutmans
characterizes as "not another Struts" but a simple web development
framework containing "80 to 90 percent of what people need." (Apache
Struts is a web development framework for Java.) Zend Framework is
currently available as a preview release under the open-source BSD
license.