My Pilot is picked up for another season

My pilot blog has been picked up, woohoo! Like a news article circulation or a TV series it’s important for the pilot to hit a cord with the audience, and I’ve been lucky enough that after a few articles on my blog my editor is giving me the opportunity to have my own space and corner in the Zend newsletter.

So my blog went from a few eyeballs to a few million and the pressure is on. The readership of the Zend PHP newsletter goes to some of the most advanced internet thought leaders in business. As you can imagine this diverse audience creates a challenge for an engineer like myself. What does my audience want to know about open source PHP, since it’s very well documented, and plenty of great magazines and sites online with examples, user groups/conferences/training etc? But as well documented and supported PHP is in the internet, it is far less understood in the enterprise and behind the firewall. Gartner Group finds 85 percent of enterprises adopting open source, and published a report recently that said that in the next 5 years, there will be a 5 fold increase in enterprise PHP developers.

Much of that development will be new work or modernizing and converting older systems, most legacy mini and mainframe system need to be put on the web. And client/server systems have a high costs of maintenance and distribution problems that a web system would drastically improve. 67% of all internal systems are still legacy and will need to be updated to the web. PHP is a technology that already has been proven outside the firewall to be cost effective in this type of migration. And this climate favors open source based solutions like PHP that allow companies to start working with little to no budget and prove the concept quickly before they invest in the whole business plan. Take a look at this webinar about an example PHP project and ROI with PHP. It’s a far cry from the past when companies spent precious corporate funds on proprietary software only to find out that it limits what they needed to do, or would take months to years to complete a project, or worse wasnt a fit at all. Now you can implement a pilot project to prove out your concept, and then use enterprise open source technology to go production with it. Like using fedora before rolling out RHEL, or using PHP, Zend Framework and the community edition of Zend Server, you can do a lot with the basic software . Imagine what can be done with the enterprise version, well how about a boost of at least 30% more productivity in development. Now that's a good return ontop of the already big gains from PHP alone.

So what happens behind the firewall with PHP is not very well documented and I hope to share and collaborate with my audience about the PHP innovations that are not as visible as the ones outside the firewall. From Government to Health care to Media to all sorts of interesting businesses sectors, I hope to use this blog to highlight the work that is going on behind the firewall with PHP. Its the hidden side of PHP. And yes, I will still write about PHP internet sites here, as some of the interesting concepts start outside and work there way into the corporate datacenter. Collaboration is always welcomed on this blog, just send me a note here or email with any ideas you have for articles.

oDesk says PHP development outstrips demand for all other programming skills

EDC predicts PHP is best all around scripting language based on its latest developers survey results

Evans Data Corp Scripting Language Ranking 2009 Report

This song goes out to Ifat my editor its a band in Stafford England I just discovered a few months back, you guessed it called The Editors