It has taken longer than I had hoped for, but the result exceeded my expectation as well! We now have Zend Blogs at blogs.zend.com and it looks very nice. That is where I will be posting from now on, and I'll be encouraging my collegues to move their blogs there as well.

We are not imposing much constraints on what Zenders can post there, so over time you should be able to get a fairly eclectic set of views on what goes on at Zend.

Thanks to Yahoo for hosting me in the meantime.

Chris Anderson posts a message on The Long Tail about Google Apps and says that the adoption of them will be driven by new and better things they do, not because they simply replace the functionality of your desktop apps. I subscribe to that, and have another example of such use:

I have regular status meetings with people in my team, and with peers at Zend, and most of those are in other locations than our Cupertino office. So we talk over the phone or Skype, and track our projects and action items in a Google Spreadsheet. These are simple lists that I share with them, one for each relationship. I call them Project Trackers.

If in midweek I come across an item that needs to be discussed in the next one-on-one with any of them, I simply add it to the relevant Project Tracker and so do my partners. I now use it with our PR firm too.

Any time I have invited someone to share a Project Tracker with me, the signup procedure was completed within two minutes (I have not yet come across someone who did not have a Google ID/email address).

I am sure that there are more sophisticated shared project management tools, some even free, but the ease with which I set these ones up, and the ease with which my partners know how to edit them, defeats all the counter arguments for me.

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By the way, Chris Anderson will be a keynote speaker at our Zend PHP Conference in San Jose on October 31st.

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Today we announced the closing of our Series D financing for a total of $20 million. The series was led by Greylock Partners, while the existing investors all participated too.

It is further evidence that investors see the path to profitable open source companies.

Zend is clearly benefiting from the surge of investments that Web2.0 companies are making to improve their web infrastructures, and from the interest that large corporations have in using the same technologies to improve their customer facing applications. As these web applications attract growing traffic and become more critical, Zend has much value to offer.

Recently we have said frequently that most Web20 companies use PHP for their infrastructure. It depends of course which list of companies you check, but if you want to try this for yourself, go to the homepage of any company you are interested in and try looking for the page <<homepage url>>/index.php. If that does not produce a page error, chances are you are looking at a PHP site. If it does produce a page error you have not yet proven the opposite, they may have changed the default naming convention.

We see this adoption all over the world, and will be using the funding to start offices in more markets, strengthen our ability to deliver high value services, and accelerate product schedules.

Stefan Esser brought it to our attention. His advisory on Hardened PHP gives the details. The timeline listed in it:

Disclosure Timeline:

21. August 2006 - Contacted Zend by email

24. August 2006 - Zend released an updated Zend Platform

24. August 2006 - Public Disclosure

Yesterday we informed all customers who might be impacted by it with instructions on how to apply a patch. Based on feedback we think these instructions have been widely followed.

Thank you to Stefan for bringing us the alert. This fast turnaround from report, to fix, to disclosure, to customer service with customers, to closure, in four days is probably the only acceptable standard in this industry.

But I am happy we are hitting it.