From the ‘it’s about time!‘ files:
I’ve had the good fortune to speak with Zend co-founder and PHP superstar Andi Gutmans several dozen times over the last few years. Though he co-founded Zend, Gutmans has long been its CTO with others taking on the role of CEO.
That changes now as Gutmans was named today as the new CEO of Zend.
I gotta tell you good readers, I’ve spoken to a number of Zend’s ‘C’ level people in the past. Though certainly some of them have been very sharp, none have ever compared to Gutmans – at least in my narrow viewpoint as a journalist and one-time PHP developer.
Gutmans understands not just the language he helped to create (with PHP 3 and onwards) but he has an unmatched critical understanding of the larger macro-enterprise development issues and applications where PHP plays a critical role.
Though Gutmans and Zend co-founder Zeev Suraski did not technically speaking create PHP (Rasmus Lerfdorf did that), Gutmans and Suraski wrote much of what become PHP 3 which was in my opinion a major turning point for PHP. From the PHP 3 release onwards, PHP became the lingua franca of web development applications.
It certainly is an exciting time in the PHP development world. A new version of PHP (version 5.3) is moving along towards release and work on the Zend Framework continues to advance PHP against .NET and JavaEE.
With a technical leader at the helm of a technical company, we can only expect good technical things to happen.