Zend and the art of PHP
Published: 10 May 2002 16:17 BST
In the recent economic climate, this cost-effectiveness has boosted adoption of PHP. Once companies have the technology in place, they've found that deployment of Zend's products have further improved their ROI due to reduced time-to-market, ease of use, a short learning curve, productivity gains, and runtime performance. Additionally, deployment of Zend Accelerator offers such a huge performance improvement that supplemental hardware has become unnecessary in many cases -- a great money-saver.
Another factor that's driving the popularity of Zend in particular is the effectiveness of its products. While each one is positioned strongly in its own area, all Zend platform components are completely integrated with each other and with the PHP module itself.
Once a business has been introduced to PHP, Zend is the only company that provides a complete, end-to-end development platform. While there are competing products in each of the discussed areas, none of them has the level of professionalism or integration capabilities that the Zend products provide. Needless to say, Zend has a significant advantage in that its team maintains PHP itself. With these great benefits, Zend's popularity has continued to increase.
Target market
In the past, PHP and Zend deployments were used primarily by small to medium-size Web development, design, and hosting companies. This makes perfect sense, as these types of businesses tend to be positioned particularly well to take advantage of PHP's Web-centric nature.
More recently, however, Zend has reported a significant trend toward medium to large nontechnology-based businesses using its products. These companies have chosen Zend largely because PHP is widely used and has a substantial knowledge base. The language has caught on so well that it's finding its way into standard tech buzzword lore.
Now that PHP has become a proven technology, its usage is growing in the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom. These countries are all leaders in development technology, so expertise is easy to find. PHP is becoming a staple for Web developers, and intelligent business practice dictates that you use the resources at hand.
Zend products target two broad categories -- Web development and performance enhancement. While many authoring tools are available for editing PHP and HTML, only Zend Studio and Zend Encoder are appropriate for serious professionals. With debugging and facilitated deployment functionalities, these products have elevated PHP use to be on par with competing technologies.
As for performance enhancement, Zend's Accelerator product sells itself. The Zend platform offers better, less expensive improvements over third-party caching solutions. Additionally, PHP, having been designed specifically for Web use, runs more efficiently than competing technologies.
Conclusion
With Zend's help, PHP has grown from a quest for better tools for Web development into a complete platform suitable for enterprise deployments. Its popularity has grown, creating a tremendous resource base. In a time when organizations are looking to squeeze every penny, the benefits of deploying PHP have been embraced. By taking advantage of PHP's open source nature, Zend has broken the paradigm and achieved what every company wants: cheap, fast, and good.
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