Tuesday, 31 January 2012 14:29 | 
Written by Michael B. Kelley | 
| 
| 
Zend Technologies' founders, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, were involved in the early days of PHP when it was being extended after the initial creation by Rasmus Lerdorf.
After rewriting the parser for the release of PHP 3, they went on to completely rewrite the parser again, calling it the Zend Engine, in 1998. The Zend Engine was then subsequently used as the core PHP engine behind PHP 4 and the rest is history - PHP has since been used by over 20 million Internet domains (as of April 2007) and is by far the most popular web server programming language.
These days, Zend provide products to facilitate all aspects of PHP including PHP frameworks, web server tools and applications, security tools, and an IDE for PHP development.
Zend also provide the industry standard PHP certification qualification - Zend Certification - for which you can find a lot more information at the Zend website or elsewhere on this site.