Zend Raises $20 Million

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

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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.

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