PHP In the Cloud

Remember my meeting with Siddhartha Agarwal, one of the Vice Presidents at Zend Technologies? In the meeting while eating breakfast, there was an interesting conversation apart from the discussion on strategy Microsoft-Open Source which I have described some time ago.

That morning I tried to raise the topic of usage PHP at the corporate level as an enterprise solution product. PHP is indeed very popular among web developers for creating websites, CMS and simple information systems, but among corporates, especially for high-scale information systems, PHP is not the main choice. Most choose Java technology, ASP/.NET, even Visual Basic .NET. Why does this happen? My analysis may be because PHP is synonymous with open source, and open source is often associated with free, indie developers, no official technical support. Is that true?

Siddharta denied my analysis, not because it was wrong, but because there had been a paradigm shift in how corporations view open source. Now Open Source technology is no longer underestimated by corporate users, and Zend as a company that supports PHP continues to develop PHP frameworks to keep up with the needs of corporate systems. Including adaptation/integration with popular platforms and technologies. For example, Cloud Computing.

Yes, PHP under the umbrella Zend Technologies has been able to develop the most popular programming language in the world to be able to running on cloud platform. Amazon E3, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid and even Azure are some cloud platforms that already support the PHP system. Not only that, it turns out that the PHP framework is now very flexible in using cloud service servers which can use several cloud platforms at once without many code changes/adaptations.

I personally struggled with PHP/Zend Framework a few years ago and at that time, as an individual user, I didn't get official support. Although there is a very active community to help as a substitute for official support, it seems (at that time) PHP/Zend is still not good enough to enter the corporate level. Well, that was two years ago and it looks like things are very different now.

In your opinion, the prospects for PHP (in particular) and Open Source (in general) to enter the corporate/enterprise level are bright or are they less popular than proprietary technologies? We are waiting for your response in the comments column :)