CISCO and IBM bet big on Open Source this week

Its been a busy week of open source activity by two of the tech industry's bellwethers. Early this week CISCO made a big announcement of its new architecture called Unified Computing. Aside from the usual new CISCO hardware there was a big bet on using open source software on its complete virtualization solution, based on LAMP and yes PHP can be shipped on every hosted server.

If you recall, it was only last month that I wrote an article in our Zend Newsletter and quotes from CISCO leader John Chambers. He was hinting about "aggressively investing in new markets to ensure success when the economy becomes healthy once again", but he said that Cisco will be even stronger, I think he was referring to his big bet on Unified Computing and Open Source initiatives. You tell me, here's that article and Cisco comments at the end.

Another divisions at Cisco called Webex, continually rolls out innovative PHP projects. The latest project took only 4 days to develop a iPHONE application in PHP, wow that's real agile development. How did they roll out soo fast, they took advantage of open source Zend Framework and our developer stack to quickly develop it.

Today's big rumor was about IBM merging with SUN MICRO in the Wall St. Journal. Sun has been struggling to revive its financial prospects and declining Solaris business, the only semi-bright spot has been its open software. But open sourcing Java has been a rocky road, and more agile environments like PHP and others, have made significant progress. Ajaxian claims more new web2.0 app developers are using PHP then Java, Burton study reported on Ajaxian, more then 5 times more PHP developers. oDESK high tech job site reports 6 times more demand for PHP developers even during these difficult economic times. And over 22mil websites run PHP on the internet, its because PHP is easy and usually installed by default whenever a new LAMP server is spun up.

But inside the firewall, Java and other tech like ASP and Client/Server have ruled for a long time because of the head start, but luckily PHP programmers can play nice if they need to frontend a Java server. Its call Java Bridge for PHP and its available in our beta Zend Server, see this Caffeinated PHP video webinar to get a good insight of what is possible by my pal Kevin who was using our current production version of it. Works the same in the beta.

So I am excited about this IBM rumor, I have to say its a big bet by BIG BLUE on open source and IBM has been betting on both Java and PHP for a long time. Zend has had a long partnership with IBM and recently all IBM iSeries boxes ship with Zend PHP stack by default. Read more about the announcements in our Zend IBM Newsletter. And if you want to see all the interesting PHP projects at IBM, look here on IBM developerWorks. Take a look at one of my favorite IBM projects built on Zend Framework in the early days, here's the case study, and video.

Have you placed any open source bets inside your own company? If not, take a look at using ZEND PHP stack to do a project faster, better, cheaper. Lots of info on Google, and our site, but if you want to chat with a live person to help get you started, you can ring us at Zend or ping us on chat.

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Here's a musical selection for this article to celebrate the symphony of these announcements, a classical favorite of mine from the USSR Orchestra playing Chopin, press play