Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

For years I've wanted to run a personal Web site but never found the time to do it. A couple of weeks ago a few Zenders and I started leasing a dedicated server which gave us each a bit more hosting flexibility. Once we got the machine up and running I decided it was finally time to actually launch my own personal Web site.

He lists the technologies he's using including the Zend Framework, the Zend_Gdata component and the Zend_Cache (for local caching of his blog feeds from Blogger).

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.

In this 5 minute podcast, Jon and Andi talk about a wide variety of topics. They touch on PHP Scalability, Web Services, Zend Framework and how Zend implemented the Lucene search engine in PHP.

Cal also mentions their discussion of the BIRT reporting functionality that is newly integrated with the Zend Platform product.

You can grab the full podcast here.