Zend Announces New Continuous Delivery Capabilities to Accelerate App Delivery and Business Value

Zend, the PHP Company, today announced the “next wave” of agility-focused offerings, enabling enterprises to deliver applications more quickly, while delivering on bottom-line business value. The product and pattern offerings meet an across-the-board market demand by extending the Continuous Delivery ecosystem, allowing companies to quickly develop and deliver quality web, mobile and cloud applications.

“Disruptive innovation starts with empowering developers to develop quality applications faster, deploy them continuously and scale them infinitely. Our Amazon Web Services offering, which includes a cloud and mobile-friendly developer ecosystem, has generated additional requests for agile, innovative products, patterns and tools,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO and Co-founder, Zend. “This ‘next wave’ of offerings further extends the developer ecosystem, arming more developers with the technology ammunition they need to deliver innovation faster.”

Continuous Delivery is a business “must-have” as mobile usage, cloud adoption and customer demand underscore the need for speedy software development and delivery. Basically, Continuous Delivery redefines the application lifecycle, reshaping the process into a single, streamlined, iterative flow. DevOps, or the agile and collaborative relationship between development teams and IT operations, is an integral piece of the Continuous Delivery process. In fact, Zend’s latest Zend Developer Pulse™ survey, which includes the responses of more than 4,000 software developers, indicates that 97 percent of companies that have not adopted Continuous Delivery experience issues with deploying application changes to production. Also, 79 percent of these same non-Continuous Delivery companies report their developers spend 25 percent or more of their time on problem resolution rather than developing new functionalities.

One critical component of Continuous Delivery and DevOps is “Left Shifting,” or focusing on ensuring quality and correcting bugs/issues early in the software lifecycle. Zend is empowering developers to create quality applications faster with the developer-centric Zend Server 8, the company’s newest integrated application platform for mobile and web applications. In this new version, Z-Ray, the toolbar that provides app debugging info in the browser extends its app X-Ray insight to provide specific debugging details for a variety of popular applications and frameworks. For Magento, Drupal, WordPress, Zend Framework and Symfony developers, this will make Zend Server an indispensable tool. The new Z-Ray Live! provides that same level of visibility for mobile and API web services debugging – letting developers see into the server-side execution of mobile app requests.

Zend is also enabling more businesses to easily adopt Continuous Delivery and DevOps-enabled practices and accelerate the application delivery process with the introduction of three new patterns: Zend Server integrations with Docker, Puppet, and Bamboo. The new patterns are part of Zend’s Blueprint for Continuous Delivery, a solution built on the Zend Server platform and initially released last year. These patterns include plugs-ins and best practices for various steps of the Continuous Delivery cycle, such as Continuous Integration and infrastructure automation.

• Zend Pattern for Infrastructure Management with Docker allows you to shorten development cycles and increase testing speed by isolating dependencies and rapidly “spinning up” containers with Zend Server and your application infrastructure.
• Zend Pattern for Infrastructure Automation with Puppet allows you to script, automate and manage your Zend Server PHP application infrastructure as code, eliminating error potential in the process.
• Zend Pattern for Continuous Integration with Bamboo offers new options for IT development shops that want to significantly ramp up their delivery speed. Continuous Integration with Bamboo and Zend Server allows you to automate the packaging and deployment of PHP application builds as part of standard integration testing each time new code is generated or at specific intervals.

To bring the advantages of Zend’s solutions to a new audience, Zend Server, for the first time, is now supported on Linux running on IBM Power8 systems.  This technology option provides enterprises looking for mobile and web scale-out systems significant performance and ROI advantages over x86. These enterprises can now run PHP optimized for Power8, with the standardization and automation that running at scale requires.

Zend also now offers monthly pricing/billing options for products and services, giving customers a flexible monthly billing option rather than an annual subscription fee.

For more information on Zend’s Continuous Delivery Blueprint and new patterns, visit: zend.com/continuousdelivery.