PHP Application Vendors Gearing Up for Smart Cube Appliances

Published: June 29, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As The Four Hundred reported a month ago when the Smart Cube i and Linux appliance servers and their related Smart Market were launched in the United States, Zend Technologies Zend Core PHP engine is bundled on these boxes so ISVs can deploy PHP-based applications on the i or Linux boxes or front ends for RPG applications that are redone in PHP on the i versions of the machine.

The question now is this: Are the PHP application vendors going to jump through the hoops and get their applications certified to play nice with the automation embodied in the Smart Market? (You might ask the vendors of RPG, COBOL, and Java applications that have been tuned for the i platform the same question, I suppose.) Zend certainly hopes so, according to Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at Zend, and the i platform installed base should be rooting for PHP applications being ported to the i, too.

Last week, Zend announced that four PHP application vendors are working to get their applications certified on the Smart Market. OpenPro, the creator of a PHP-based open source ERP suite that has been around since 1999, has its eponymous software running on the Smart Cube Linux box, which supports a modified version of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2. WebConcepts, which sells a set of demand planning, inventory management, business intelligence, and collaboration software also coded in PHP, has also put its code on the Linux-based Smart Cube. And Dillard says that OrangeHRM, a maker of open source human resource management software, and vTiger, a maker of open source customer relationship management software, will soon have their code certified and available for purchase through the Smart Market on the Linux-based Smart Cubes.

Here's the important bit, as far as i shops are concerned: All four vendors have plans to support the i-Zend Core combo and ship their products on the Smart Cube i boxes. When's the last time you heard about four application software vendors porting their code to the AS/400 platform or any of its progeny in the same week?

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