The big deal about IBM and Zend's partnership

IBM is putting its corporate heft behind your favorite web development technology.

IBM announced a partnership with Zend to create a bundle called Zend Core, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools. Zend sells tools built on the open-source edition of PHP and offers related services.

<!-- Search Engine Component --> The two companies intend to devote programmers to make PHP work better with corporate databases and Web services protocols. IBM also plans to establish an area dedicated to PHP on its developer Web site, which will include technical resources such as white papers. Zend Core will be available as a free download in the second half of the year.

I question whether this will change things for those using PHP, but the one thing it should do is give PHP a little more clout with enterprise customers who are either too nervous to use it or too embarassed to admit that they already do. IBM's public commitment to PHP is significant because the company has the technical and marketing resources to accelerate usage of the open-source product. IBM's investments in Linux and Java, for example, were crucial to mainstream corporation adoption of those technologies.

"We've got ideas for improving things," said Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging technology. "We worked on specifications in the Java community that weren't language-specific and are applicable to the PHP world."