Well today is the day of a few endings: End of the month and sort of End of the Summer Season.

There is always a feverish pace to the last day of the month to try and get all the last minute sales deals closed to show respectable numbers for the month. This is especially difficult today with virtually half of our customers on vacation and the others on “vacation mode.”

With the end of the summer “silly” season, I look for things to wake up next week as we go into the traditional high season and back to more productive work schedules. Surprisingly August was a bit more active than expected with a feeling that us and php might be making a bigger splash in the UK. Several very large enterprises and financial institutions have shown an interest in talking with us and we hope to do see some progress there. Some of the rather large PR we have been doing has got to pay off sometime.

One of the larger institutions that approached us did evidence the ongoing tug of war that goes in behind the scenes when trying to bring in php and open source apps in general. Some of the MS guys allege that php is inherently unsafe according to a number of articles and white papers they have read. My Google search for these articles pulls up nothing but some old php holes from a few years ago and the infamous summer of coding and lots of great articles on how to write secure php code. Not to mention the big php and Facebook brouhaha a couple of weeks ago which turned out to be nothing. We’re waiting for these guys to show us some of these articles but doubt if it is anything earth shattering. Back to the battlelines to prove that php is a viable, safe and secure option for enterprise applications.

Here’s to cooler and busy days ahead.

Well here it is August 1 and the first third of Q3 is under the belt. Ended nicely with some larger deals coming in at the last minute. August is always a challenge as half of Europe is on vacation and the other half is in vacation mode.

Recently ran across an interesting White Paper entitled the Open Source Barometer and published by Alfresco, the open source ECM application. We’re always looking for justifications for the large gap in open source adoption between the UK and the rest of Europe and this article alludes to:

“…The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.” This very much mirrors are experience at Zend with working with the various European countries. Virtually everywhere except the UK, there are huge open source initiatives driven by the respective governments. They are few in the UK and despite a lot of talk, we see very little new initiatives. On the bright side, we do see some larger php projects driven by regional educational organizations using open source applications in e-learning and remote learning projects. These initiatives are to be encouraged.

Another interesting trend as cited in the White Paper refers to a trend we also see in that “there is an increasing trend for organizations to adopt a mixed stack, combining both open source and proprietary software.” This enables organizations to pick and choose among the best solutions available for the particular project. Thus we often see php projects being developed on Windows machines and then deployed on Linux servers using Apache, and maybe even using Oracle or MS databases. Essentially that is our model at Zend since our Studio and Platform are proprietary applications and used with open source php, Apache, MySql, various Linux distributions, etc.

May the Gods of Summer bring fortune to us in August.

Here’s the first blog entry from the Zend sales side of things. We don’t often write about this part of the business as geeky entries tend to predominate these pages. So I’ll shed a little light on what goes on in the Tel Aviv sales department in Zend.

Fridays tend to be quiet here as many customers seem to play low key today. After answering the emails from yesterday, I make some calls to downloaders of the Zend products and see how the install went. Nice call to a large British professional society who is testing the Studio and Platform and are considering moving from Java to PHP (nice idea guys) and this would bring some good business if it happens like they say, in a few months.

The usual rash of tech support and licensing issues calls came in by email and chat. We could spend hours just answering support questions from Chinese and Indian downloaders of the Optimizer. Someday these markets may produce significant numbers for us if we ever learn how to tap them, and if they have the budget to buy our applications.

I found out from MocoNews that Extreme Mobile is to start operations soon and see that their front end site is in php. Got the contact name and will see what we can do together.

The rest of the afternoon will be taken up by some more calls to customers, and also some research on new markets we want to branch out to. This is an essential part of our efforts as we try to enhance the already strong demand with new sources of business.

The Zend Business Conference in London earlier in July was a big success from our end. Had the chance to meet lots of our existing customers personally, and also some new ones. The reviews were overall positive and many attendees wanted to see more conferences of this sort in the future. We hope to oblige. We get the impression that php use is growing rapidly in the UK, as evidenced by a sharp demand for developers. Maintaining a high profile in the market will motivate developers to use the Zend solutions for their work.

Hope to come back rather often with new entries and news tidbits on Sales from Zend.

-Howard