PHP pioneer and Zend co-founder enlists for AWS big-data mission

Andi Gutmans, a pioneer in scripting language PHP and co-founder of Zend Technologies, has joined Amazon’s cloud.

Gutmans has become general manager of the NoSQL Group, part of the AWS data services unit.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Gutmans is “working on the next generation of NoSQL database”.

Gutmans blogged here: “I will be part of a team with a major focus on delivering real-time responses to enable the next generation of apps and services.

“The challenges are multi-faceted and include: In memory databases, scalability and high availability, different database paradigms... And strengthening developer productivity to support the required time to market.”

The PHP chief reckoned AWS had “established clear leadership” with services such as Redshfit, RDS, ElastiCache and DynamoDB.

Gutmans joined Jeff Bezos' mighty AWS cloud operation in March, five months after Zend Technologies – the company he co-founded with PHP co-pioneer Zeev Suraski – was bought by software tools business Rogue Wave Software.

The PHP tools were added to Zend’s trophy cabinet of capabilities for C, C++, C# AND Java.

Gutmans had served briefly as executive vice president of Rogue Wave’s strategic partnerships.

Suraski remains at Zend, where he is CTO.

As students, in 1999, Gutmans and Suraski wrote the Zend Engine – the open-source scripting language that interpreted PHP and which appeared in PHP 4.0.

They founded Zend Technologies the same year, building commercial support and services around PHP with a framework, server and tools for the scripting language.

They did so as PHP took off with Perl and Python as part of the LAMP stack with Linux and Apache Server for the building of the younger, more open web – which, crucially, was not based around either Microsoft’s closed and proprietary .NET or your dad’s Java. ®