PHP Magazine has a new post today about the real effect on the community that they whole Zend/IBM deal will make, and how Gartner thinks it will not really change the market dynamics that much.

In response to Zend's recent deal with IBM to create a bundle called ZendCore, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools (See related news), research house Gartner has just published a report that notes "the deal won't change the dynamics of the PHP market, which will continue to grow steadily". Gartner also notes that "a partnership between Zend and Sun Microsystems that begun in November 2003 to better integrate Java and PHP hasn't significantly benefited PHP, apart from PHP's own natural market growth". However, Gartner notes that this partnership could open up a short term window of opportunity for Zend developers to appeal to Java developers who are frustrated with the complexity of Java 2, Enterprise Edition development when building tactical applications.

Gartner's recommendation: "Companies seeking a well-regarded tool for rapid development of database-enabled Web applications should consider PHP, but should also be aware that this choice represents a path separate from the two major platforms (Java and Microsoft .NET)."

For more information and all of the details of their study, check out this PDF. It seems a little silly to me that they even feel the need to mention that it's a "path separate from the two major platforms". They might be larger in user-base, but I can guarantee that if PHP keeps growing like it is, PHP's time is not far off...