Zend Technologies Ltd.
Type	Privately held company
Industry	Software
Founded	1999
Founder(s)	Andi Gutmans, Zeev Suraski
Headquarters	Cupertino, California,  United States Ramat Gan, Israel
Key people	Andi Gutmans, CEO Zeev Suraski, CTO Siddhartha Agarwal, VP Operations Elaine Lennox, CMO Curt DiSibio, CFO
Products	Zend Server Zend Studio Zend Framework Zend Engine
Services	PHP Consulting, PHP Training
Website	www.zend.com

Zend Technologies Ltd. is an Israeli world wide web infrastructure software company with headquarters in Cupertino, California, U.S., technology center in Ramat Gan,  Tel Aviv, Israel and offices in France, Italy and Germany. The company's operations are currently centered on the development of products relating to the development, deployment and management of PHP-based web applications, including Zend Studio.

History
Zend Technologies was founded by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski who, along with other Israeli graduates of the Technion, developed PHP after its creation by Rasmus Lerdorf.
In 1997, Gutmans and Suraski rewrote the parser of PHP-FI, originally written by Lerdorf, resulting in PHP 3. In 1998 they redesigned that parser completely, and named it the Zend Engine. The name Zend is a combination of Suraski's and Gutmans' forenames, Zeev and Andi. PHP 4 is based on the first version of the Zend Engine.

In 1999, their company Zend Technologies was formally established and received initial funding from Israeli venture capital funds Platinum Neurone Ventures and Walden Israel, an experienced business executive, Doron Gerstel, was recruited to head the company as a CEO.

In July 2004, Zend Technologies raised $8M in a series C funding and established a headquarters in the USA. In January 2005 Intel Capital and SAP ventures joined the existing investors in Zend Technologies.

In June 2006, Zend Technologies received the Best Startup Software Company Award at the Israeli Venture Association Annual Hi Tech Conference in Tel Aviv. The award was presented by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In August 2006 Zend raised $20 Million in a series D funding.

In February 2009, Zend's Co-Founder Andi Gutmans was appointed as Chief Executive Officer, after previously serving as the company's VP of Research and Development. Zend also recruited Mark Burton, who previously served as EVP of worldwide sales and alliances at MySQL, as Executive Chairman.

Products
Zend Server
Zend Server is a web application server for running and managing PHP applications. Zend Server comes with built-in application monitoring, application problem diagnostics, caching and optimization capabilities and a Web-based administrator console. Zend Server’s installers are native to the OS (RPM/DEB/MSI) and include a tested PHP distribution, Zend Framework, out-of-the-box connectivity to all common databases, Java connectivity, and a scalable and PHP-integrated download server (for Linux only).

Zend Server Community Edition
The community edition of Zend Server is a free, complete PHP stack that is suited for developing PHP applications or running non-critical applications in production. Zend Server Community Edition is simple to install, supports Linux, Windows, iSeries i5/OS, and Mac OS X, and is periodically updated by Zend.

Zend Platform
Zend Platform is a product that runs on a web server, monitoring PHP applications and reporting on performance and possible problems. It also offers a PHP accelerator (often confused with the free Zend Optimizer), a content caching solution including an API for partial page caching, session clustering and numerous management tools. Zend Platform can be used in conjunction with Zend Studio to do remote debugging and profiling of PHP applications in their native server environment.

Zend Studio
Zend Studio is a commercial, proprietary integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP.

Zend Guard is a product that can prevent from peeping into PHP scripts.

Zend Certification Test

Zend also provides a PHP Certification Test and certifies people succeeding on the exam as Zend Certified PHP Engineers (ZCE). This is not to be confused with the Zend Framework Certification. It is intended to prove that a person is fully qualified to develop PHP web applications. There are almost 5,000 Zend Certified Engineers in the world with either PHP 4 or PHP 5 or PHP 5.3 certifications. To help Zend Certified Engineers gain employment, Zend lists all the persons who have passed the Zend PHP Certification Exam in its directory, Yellow Pages for PHP Professionals. Also, they allow ZCEs to place a ZCE logo on their personal web site/resume.

As PHP is mainly used as a web development language, the ZCE tests the candidate over a variety of skills necessary for developing web applications. The PHP 5 Certification exam covers:

PHP Basics

Functions

Arrays

Object-oriented programming

Security, including Cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection

XML and Web Services, including SimpleXML, Xpath, SOAP, and REST

Strings and patterns, including PCRE

Databases and SQL

Web Features, such as sessions, forms, GET and POST data, cookies, and HTTP headers

Streams and Network Programming

Differences between PHP 4 and 5

Design and Theory

Php.ini settings

Although these are the Study Guide contents, there are more topics to consider in order to be prepared for the exam, such as use of the new extension PHP Data Object (PDO) layer to access databases, and the Standard PHP Library (SPL), a new set of classes specially created to manipulate objects as sets of arrays or files.

Zend considers the required score to pass the test confidential, as well as the questions themself. They will inform failing candidates only about the topics that made them fail. It is known that candidates must pass every topic to pass the test as whole, and it is believed that the required score per topic might be about 75-85%.

Sponsored projects
Zend Engine

Zend Engine is the heart of PHP, originally written by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. The first version of Zend Engine was shipped with PHP4. Zend sponsors some developers to actively contribute to the engine, while the main development of Zend Engine today comes from contributors to the PHP project.

Zend Framework
Zend Framework is an open-source, object-oriented web application framework written in PHP5 and licensed under the new BSD license.

Simple Cloud API
The Simple Cloud API is an open-source PHP API for accessing services from multiple cloud vendors with configuration changes alone. This project is the first project Zend has launched to facilitate PHP development for the cloud.

Social events
Zend Technologies visits events worldwide to spread the OSS message. In 2005, Zeev Suraski delivered a speech at the OSS Technical Seminar organized by the Open Standard Support Organization,Sunwah - PearL Linux and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.