Today we announced that IBM will now ship a preloaded image of Zend's Web stack with any OS upgrade and/or new system purchase. The goal is to distribute the Zend PHP-based stack more broadly and deliver an out-of-the-box experience for PHP on IBM i (formerly known as AS/400 and i-series).
The relationship with the IBM i team started in 2005. I was deeply involved in forming the partnership and at the time did a lot of the research to better understand the opportunity. This was the first time I really got to know the IBM i community and very quickly I discovered a passionate community who loved their platform but really needed a Web solution badly. There were several solutions at the time which enabled IBM i customers to Web-enable their applications. However, PHP was of biggest interest to the community for many reasons including:








