Andi Gutmans talks PHP as new Zend CEO

By Jeff Feinman

March 3, 2009 —

Andi Gutmans’ appointment to the head position of Zend Technologies in early February did not come as a surprise to many. For starters, Gutmans was a company cofounder and helped build the enterprise PHP toolmaker, focusing on expanding the PHP community and maturing the market. The young yet experienced programmer has also gotten his feet wet as the main company spokesman and driving force behind company strategy. He spoke with SD Times about how he will work to keep PHP a legitimate scripting language and how he will try to drive Zend forward in his new post.

SD Times: What was your reaction to becoming CEO?
Andi Gutmans: There wasn’t really an immediate reaction from me because I’ve been driving the strategy of the company for the past few years, pretty much since 2005. Part of that strategy was to really make sure that we leverage the whole PHP community and mature the market around PHP. We kind of got to this point now where we’re rolling out the next phase of this strategy, which is Zend Server, which we just launched into public beta. So the board really felt that I was the right person to take that strategy that I’ve been leading and make sure we execute it all the way. I would say it was less of a shock and more of just a natural progression.

With Zend Server, is the company moving in a new direction?
When I started the company with Zeev Suraski, we were trying to make sure that we delivered production solutions for business-critical applications: performance, monitoring, anything you need to run a reliable application. The DNA of the company is definitely production and performance of PHP. We deal with some of the largest websites out there, so the Zend Server rollout is extremely important for the company because it takes that next step into production. Zend Server is, I would say, where the DNA of the company meets the footprint that we got from our Zend Framework application framework, and we really want to leverage that to grow our server footprint.

What is the company’s road map, and how will Zend Server and other products help carry that out?
We will continue to build on the cohesiveness of our solution by more deeply integrating Zend Studio for Eclipse, our Eclipse-based IDE, Zend Framework and Zend Server, all into one seamless experience. Our Zend Server goal is to tie together the production side with rest of the development life cycle and ensure that applications built on Zend run securely, run reliably, and scale well.

Delivering consistency between development and production has been a challenge for many users, and by enabling them to use Zend Server across platforms and workstations with deeper tooling integration, our customers will enjoy significant productivity and quality gains. We are also supporting ISV communities with this end-to-end solution and anticipate that they will be standardizing their customers' production environments on Zend Server for these very same reasons.

Since you come from the technical side of the industry, how do you plan to balance the technical side with the marketing side of being a CEO?
I came to America about four years ago, and for most of the past few years I’ve been deeply involved in the marketing side. I’ve been the main company spokesperson, and I focused on building the ecosystem; I wouldn’t say sales side with the customers as much as sales side with strategic partners, and by bringing large deals into the company. I think that gives me a lot of strength because I really understand the market and our customers’ needs. I think that the most successful technology companies have had leaders that understand the product and the market and have been able to figure out how that translates into revenue.

What steps does Zend take to uphold the integrity of PHP’s code and make sure it’s reliable?
We continue to contribute to PHP. PHP is an open-source project, and we continue to maintain the scripting engine and to contribute on an ongoing basis. What I focused on in my previous role as CTO was not just PHP itself, but also what the ecosystem looks like and how we mature it.

In the past five years, we started Zend Framework and had huge success with Eclipse unit testing, everything you would get from the Java community or other communities. Today, we’re seeing a shift inside of companies to embrace PHP. Given the current market conditions, the difference in productivity between PHP and Java is pushing them to almost require PHP for all their new Web projects.

I used to be a Java developer, so I’ve felt the pain and have the scar tissue. For the next-generation Web, PHP is just far more productive, and it’s really the best solution. There’s a reason why we have about 35–40% market footprint, and anyone that has that amount of market footprint is always going to get attacked. That’s pretty typical.

Can you elaborate on the “scar tissue” you were talking about?
I was doing WebSphere development, and it took us about six months to get a new developer up to speed. This was a very big project; it was about a 100-person project. And it was just unbelievably complex, with very slow development times. With PHP, the pace is faster, developers are cheaper, and overall time-to-market and costs are significantly lower. And it scales, so you can build very high-quality applications with best practices, like Zend Framework, and companies like Facebook and Yahoo that scale more than almost any other company are built on PHP. I like to pride myself by saying PHP is as productive as ASP, but it scales like Java.

With the big shift to Web applications, cloud computing and software-as-a-service, do you think that PHP is beneficial for that?
Absolutely. Those are all accelerators behind us: cloud computing, open source, dynamic languages. All enterprises are looking to move their applications into the browser. Companies don’t have time and don’t have money, so they’re definitely looking at the most productive solutions that they know they can scale.

You graduated from The Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and you said that you came to America four years ago. What are some of the cultural differences that surprised you?

First of all, the Bay Area isn’t America (laughs). It’s so international, and there are a lot of different cultures. The second thing is that Israel is very Americanized. There’s a very close affinity between Israel and the U.S. I very quickly felt at home, I have to say. I’m pretty international, so I’m originally Swiss and also have a British passport. I went to an American school for high school. So, for me, I feel at home everywhere and nowhere.

Related Search Term(s): PHP, Zend

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33313

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