The broadening of partnership with IBM by Zend Technologies is aimed at increasing the growth of production-ready PHP applications in the enterprise.

Companies will be able to deploy open source PHP and DB2 across variety of hardware and operating systems, and obtain support from a single source due to integration between Zend Core for IBM and IBM DB2.

The joint initiative includes:

* Enhanced IBM DB2 Express-C capabilities in Zend Core for IBM, the certified PHP solution from Zend Technologies
* New support for DB2 Connect technology providing access to highly scalable i5/OS and z/OS DB2 data servers
* Unified, single-source support for the integrated PHP and DB2 solution stack
* Support for System i Linux partitions and the System i attached BladeCenter and System x Servers.

Zend Core for IBM provides a certified PHP based application development and deployment stack, which includes Apache, PHP, Zend Framework and DB2 Express-C. DB2 Express-C is IBM’s hybrid relational-XML data server that provides customers’ access to features like data replication, availability clustering and off-site disaster recovery.

To support heavy workloads, Zend Core for IBM now includes DB2 Connect technology that enables customers to build PHP applications that harness the scalability of DB2 hosted on IBM System z (z/OS) and System i (i5/OS) servers.
Zend Core for IBM is available at http://www.zend.com/core/ibm.