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

Corrected: June 10, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

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 serves Sandia's employees as well as 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 recently ported one application from CGIDEV2 to PHP. (With all that brain power and iron, you would never think that any organization affiliated with 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.

This story has been corrected since it originally ran. We mistakenly said that the Sandia Laboratory Federal Credit Union had ported its Web front end for its applications from CGIDEV2 to PHP, when in fact it has only ported one specific application to give PHP a whirl. A poorly worded sentence also might have given the impression that SLFCU runs financial applications for Sandia Lab itself, which it does not. The organization is an affiliated credit union, but not part of Sandia itself. IT Jungle regrets the errors. [Corrected 06/10/08]

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