There's mention today of a partnership between two large powers in the online PHP world - Zend and Apollo Interactive - joining together to "promote excellence in open source development".

Apollo Interactive, America's leading Interactive Agency, and Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today announced a partnership to promote excellence in open source development. Through the alliance, the companies will share their varied technology perspectives to improve the functionality of the PHP language - which was developed by the founders of Zend - and refine PHP implementation for large, high-volume enterprise Web sites. [...] The alliance will further the development of PHP's infrastructure and enable Zend to establish best practices for its implementation in large enterprise environments.

Apollo has covered a lot of ground when it comes to stretching PHP to its limits, and, now that they're working together, they can help the Zend team expand even further. The've even implemented the Zend Performance Suite (a single solution that dramatically increases volume of users a Web server can handle without requiring additional infrastructure investments via dynamic content caching, code acceleration and file compression technologies).