Zend and Varien Partner to Deliver an All-In-One PHP and eCommerce Solution

Zend and Varien Partner to Deliver an All-In-One PHP and eCommerce Solution

Varien’s Popular Open Source Magento eCommerce Software to Ship with Zend Server Community Edition PHP Stack

Paris (Vocus) November 9, 2009 -- Zend Technologies, Inc. (http://www.zend.com), the PHP company, and Varien (http://www.varien.com/), developer of Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/), the world’s fastest growing eCommerce platform, today announced that they have partnered to make it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to quickly evaluate, develop, and deploy flexible, state-of-the-art ecommerce Web applications. As a result of the new partnership, the Community Edition of Varien’s popular Magento™ eCommerce software will ship with the Community Edition of Zend Server (http://www.zend.com/en/products/server-ce/index), Zend’s high performance PHP Web application server.

The companies also announced that the Varien and Zend teams and open-source communities are working together on two major initiatives. Varien will be contributing a number of significant native ecommerce features to the open source, industry-standard PHP framework, Zend Framework (http://www.zend.com/en/community/framework) — an integrated part of Zend Server. Additionally, both Zend and Varien will be optimizing Magento, Zend Server, and Zend Framework to deliver peak performance for ecommerce applications.

“Magento is a robust ecommerce solution with open source reliability and flexibility – putting top-quality ecommerce functionality into the hands of virtually anyone,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. “With the new all-in-one packaging of Magento and Zend Server, it’s extremely easy for any organization to set up, install and explore Web-based commerce on a Windows or Linux platform, with the confidence that their application will run with performance, efficiency and reliability. This combination removes virtually any barriers to developing high-quality ecommerce Web sites with PHP.”

The open source Magento eCommerce platform, developed with PHP 5 and Zend Framework, has been adopted by thousands of users and is implemented by businesses with Web applications processing many tens of thousands of orders per day using multiple servers and cluster architectures. The no-cost Magento Community Edition provides a basic and powerful solution for small shops looking for a state-of-the-art ecommerce platform. Users may upgrade to the Magento Enterprise Edition (http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-edition) for more advanced features and support.

Zend Server Community Edition (CE) is a fast, reliable, no-cost PHP application stack that can be used in development, testing and production. Zend Server CE runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X and is specifically tuned to address the needs of developer desktops and laptops, as well as smaller server deployments everywhere. Zend Server is also available in a commercial, enterprise edition (http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/), which is a complete Web application server for running, monitoring and managing business-critical PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance, and security.

Using Magento CE with Zend Server CE, small and medium-sized businesses can quickly install, explore and start building state-of-the art shopping and other commerce-based Web sites with features such as catalog and order management, analytics, SEO, merchandizing, customer accounts and shipping, and then deploy them with ease on Zend Server. Users can develop Magento eCommerce applications on desktops running the Windows or Linux operating systems and deploy applications into production on both Windows and Linux. To further expand the ecommerce functionality readily available to PHP developers, Varien is also modularizing Magento and making a number of significant ecommerce feature contributions to Zend Framework, including payment gateways, shipping calculation modules, and others.

“Zend’s PHP solutions have played a major role in the development of Magento, and we are thrilled to contribute key ecommerce features back to Zend Framework to promote the development of PHP-based ecommerce,” said Roy Rubin, CEO at Varien. “Zend continues to demonstrate its unmatched expertise and strong commitment to PHP with products such as Zend Server, and we look forward to continuing to expand our partnership with them. In particular, we’re very excited that Zend Server’s support for PHP on Windows is unmatched anywhere else, as this makes exploring powerful ecommerce easy for businesses everywhere.”

Wonderbox is a vendor of romantic/adventure gift packages and does very high volumes during the holiday season and other gift-giving occasions, such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and so on. Wonderbox has an online language-specific presence in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Poland, and is opening soon in Japan, Belgium, Portugal, and elsewhere—so the international capabilities of Magento and Zend Framework are extremely important to their product plans, in addition to the open-source flexibility both are known for.

“Our Wonderbox site has been engineered for over 150,000 transactions a day and we estimate we will serve over 3 million visits during the December holiday season. We recently went from zero to a fully functioning production Web application taking customer orders in less than three months, by running Magento eCommerce on Zend Server,” said Fatih Gezen, chief technology officer at Wonderbox. “That is a compelling ROI and amazing technology story. We have in a very short time mastered the technology and can easily create intuitive online experiences for our customers to use to make purchases from us.”

“Zend Server out of the box gives us a secure, high-performing PHP stack with monitoring and other capabilities and the feature set in Magento had just about everything we needed to build our ecommerce site,” commented Chris Mann, deputy information director at Wonderbox. “We’ve additionally built a custom Magento module in Zend Framework. That has been easy to do based on the excellent training and support we’ve received from our consulting partners and from the large open-source community that’s available for both products.”

In addition to consulting partners who specialize in Magento/Zend Server installations, Zend and Varien also plan to cooperate on joint education, training, and other activities to promote ecommerce applications, including promotion of software lifecycle best practices and enterprise ecommerce training.

Availability

The complete all-in-one Magento and Zend Server solution stack is available today from both companies for download, meaning that together the huge Magento and Zend communities will have available in one package the leading PHP ecommerce solution and the best performing PHP stack. To learn more and to download these packages, please visit: http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/magento-zend or http://www.zend.com/solutions/packaged-php-applications/zend-server-magento. As announced today, the Magento eCommerce feature components will be made available for download from the Zend Framework project and will also ship as a part of the base Zend Framework that comes with every Magento eCommerce download. These will be made available as soon as the components are added to the Zend Framework project by the two teams.

About Zend Technologies

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP runs 35 percent of the world’s Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic Web applications. Deployed at more than 30,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit http://www.zend.com or call +1 408-253-8800.

About Magento

Magento is a feature-rich, professional Open Source eCommerce platform solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online channel. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing tools, a catalog-management engine and is SEO optimized to give merchants the power to create sites that provide an unrivaled and rich online shopping experience for their customers, tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento is the ultimate eCommerce solution. For more information about Magento, visit http://www.MagentoCommerce.com.

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Contact Information Lisa Sheeran

http://www.zend.com

510-724-2267

Koby Oz

Varien, Inc.

http://www.varien.com/