Zend hosts Third Annual ZEND/PHP Conference and announces new Products and Partner Initiatives

New Eclipse-Based PHP IDE, New Version of Zend Core, and Announcements by IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Highlight Start of World’s Largest PHP Conference

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA – October 9, 2007 - Today at ZendCon, the third annual Zend/PHP Conference, Zend took significant steps to further advance PHP’s capabilities as the premier platform for business-critical web applications. In a series of announcements, the company shared details about deeper integration with products from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, enhancements to the Zend version of PHP, and an all-new offering for developers who want to create PHP applications using Eclipse.

ZendCon is the largest gathering of its kind for the PHP community and for companies using PHP to build and deploy business-critical web applications. It is an important meeting place for an ecosystem that includes the world’s largest software companies, innovative web start-ups and leading-edge developers from more than 30 countries. Business application modernization, state-of-the-art graphical web applications, web service development, Web 2.0, mash-ups and user identity management are some of the over 50 sessions being led by an elite corps of business and software experts.

Today’s announcements underscore Zend’s commitment to creating the world’s best products that support commercial use of PHP, as well as its ongoing contribution to the open source PHP project and community of over 4.5 million PHP developers. The announcements include:

• Zend Studio for Eclipse – The all-new commercial PHP IDE for Eclipse with immediate availability of a downloadable beta version
• Zend Core 2.5 – Immediate availability of the new version of Zend’s production grade PHP
• IBM releases the IBM Mashup Starter Kit, based on Zend Core, Zend Framework and DB2
• Single source support from Zend for DB2 and Zend Core
• Delivery by Microsoft of a new FastCGI module to improve PHP performance on Windows
• Microsoft announces a new SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP
• Zend announces support for the Server Core option in Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Collaboration between Zend and Microsoft to deliver support for the identity management (Information Card) in Zend Framework
• Oracle Announces PHP support for Connection Pooling in Oracle® Database 11g

“PHP’s momentum and its rapid pace of innovation are driving high growth opportunities for everyone in the community, from individual developers to large corporate IT departments modernizing their business applications,” said Harold Goldberg, Zend CEO. “I’m proud to see the diversity of talent gathered at ZendCon, and to be able to showcase the results of all the hard work done by the community, by our partner companies and by Zend.”

Launch of Zend Studio for Eclipse
Zend announced Zend Studio for Eclipse, an all-new PHP Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows developers to take advantage of the sophisticated, feature-rich Eclipse framework. Zend Studio for Eclipse is a commercial product that builds on the recently announced open source Eclipse PDT project, and is aimed at speeding PHP development with a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis, optimization and database tools. At the conference, Zend made a pre-release version available under the code name Neon. General availability is expected in early 2008.

Zend Core 2.5 released
Zend announced the immediate availability of Zend Core 2.5, strengthening PHP 5 for deployment of business critical web applications. Among the improvements in version 2.5 are simplified installation and maintenance of the full PHP application stack, including web server, databases, extensions and Zend Framework. Version 2.5 releases of Zend Core for IBM, Zend Core for i5/OS and Zend Core for Oracle will be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.

IBM releases the IBM Mashup Starter Kit
In a separate announcement made earlier today in Armonk NY, IBM introduced the IBM Mashup Starter Kit. The toolkit, available from the IBM Alphaworks website, enables non-technical business users to create sophisticated business applications by combining web services with drag-and-drop ease. The toolkit has been created with PHP 5, using Zend Core for IBM, Zend Framework and DB2 data servers.

Zend confirms availability of single source support for PHP and DB2
First announced in August, Zend is now offering a single source of support for PHP applications running on DB2 databases. This solution, which includes Zend Core for IBM and DB2 Express-C, can be extended with DB2 Connect technology to provide access to i5/OS and z/OS data servers.

Microsoft releases FastCGI for PHP
Last year at ZendCon, Microsoft and Zend announced a long-term collaboration agreement aimed at increasing the reliability and performance of PHP applications on Windows. Significant progress has been made on all of the announced projects, and many of the improvements have been accepted by the PHP open source project. Today, Microsoft announced that it has delivered on another commitment with the release of the GoLive beta of an Internet Information Services (IIS) add-on component, FastCGI. FastCGI serves as an interface between PHP and an IIS Web server delivering substantial reliability and performance benefits for PHP applications running on Windows. It is now available for free from Microsoft on http://www.iis.net/php.

Microsoft announces new SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP
Microsoft today also announced the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP that gives developers an optimized way to link their PHP applications to SQL Server 2005. Microsoft and Zend are working together, and with the PHP community, to fully extend database support in PHP to SQL Server 2005 and make it part of Zend’s core PHP offering.

PHP support for Server Core option in Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Server Core is an installation option for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 that provides a minimal environment for running specific server roles, while reducing maintenance and management requirements. Zend announced today that the company will support Microsoft Server Core in upcoming releases of Zend Core, giving PHP developers a way to optimize server reliability and performance when their PHP applications are running on Windows.

Identity management with Microsoft in Zend Framework
Support for identity management is a key objective for the upcoming releases of Zend Framework. At the conference, Zend and Microsoft announced that they are collaborating to add support for Information Cards into Zend Framework. This collaboration will enable PHP developers to create applications that support identification and authentication, including single sign-on for a broad range of website users, including those using Windows CardSpace. This commitment to interoperability will reduce development costs and make the web safer and more secure for people.

Oracle announces enhanced OCI8 driver and connection pooling for PHP
Building on more than three years of collaboration with Zend, Oracle today announced an open source contribution of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP, supporting important Oracle Database 11g features such as connection pooling and fast application notification. This new OCI8 driver for PHP enables a single commodity server to support tens of thousands of database connections and, at the same time, provide higher availability. Oracle has posted a preview of the new OCI8 driver for PHP to the PECL repository. Zend will support the new capability in an upcoming release of Zend Core.

About Zend
Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty million websites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.

Zend, Zend Technologies, Zend.com and Zend Studio and/or the logos and icons associated with each of these names are trademarks of Zend Technologies, Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.