Case Studies
Click on the case studies below to see who is creating customer focused and enterprise engaging experiences with Zend software. Learn more about how our customers utilize Zend products in their work.
Challenge
Flight Systems Industrial Products (FSIP) specializing in the remanufacture of electronic controls for battery operated and electric vehicles. The Service Center was tasked to develop an application to track parts usage, reduce costs and improve response times.
Solution
Wilson Business System Consulting’s wireless bar code scanning solution utilizes PHP on both the hand-held scanner and the System i. The application affords FSIP to track inventory in real-time, reduce service center costs, and dramatically improve customer service levels.
Challenge
Barona’s existing green screen payroll programs were neither easily accessible nor intuitive for the majority of service-based employees. This structure prevented many staff members from monitoring their earnings and vacation accrual information.
Solution
Olen Business Consulting developed a PHP front-end to leveraging the RPG business logic enabling employees to access the payroll application via kiosks located around the resort. This ultimately saved Barona an estimated $50,000 annually in postage, printing and assorted other mailing costs associated with the paycheck stubs for direct deposit.
Challenge
Although Aarrowcast is considered one of the most modern foundries in the world their business processes in dealing with outside vendors and suppliers were less than leading edge. The blizzard of procurement paperwork, lack of centralization, and limited vendor performance processes creates inefficiencies throughout the business. The challenge was to build a browser-based portal that would connect into the MRP system and permit vendors to access RFQ information automatically, without purchasing having to send out for bids.
Solution
Aarrowcast enlisted the services of NSC to develop what would become the Supplier Portal. NSC was up for the task, knowing that PHP products from Zend would be key to developing the most elegant, cost-effective solution in the shortest timeframe. The Zend-based portal now automates the entire RFQ, quote, purchase order, receiving, inventory management and payment process.
Challenge
Carlo Gavazzi Automation (“Gavazzi”) is a global electronics group focused on the design, manufacturing and marketing of electronic equipment for industrial automation and information processing. Gavazzi relies on a centralized IT department, the heart of which is based on IBM Power Systems running the i operating system. Growing business requirements that demand a Web infrastructure have led Gavazzi to search for a solution that will help them Web-enable their existing enterprise 5250 applications while continuing to enjoy the application's code as the backbone of business methodology.
Solution
Gavazzi chose PHP to modernize their existing 5250 applications. Implementing PHP to Web-enable these applications improves both their response time and information consistency. Zend Solutions for IBM i offer Gavazzi reliable and readily-available PHP tools to integrate seamlessly with the many i applications that underpin their business operations. By integrating PHP and Zend Solutions for IBM i, Gavazzi Automation is able to leverage existing i application business methodologies, while reducing application development time and offering a user-friendly modernized Web interface.
Challenge
IGN Entertainment is a leading media company and division of Fox Interactive Media. IGN Entertainment's team at IGN community sites manages over 50 different community-based sites and has built an entirely new platform based on Zend Framework.Build a long-term platform using best practices and design patterns to enhance applications & performance for the IGN community sites network.
Solution
The IGN community sites team chose Zend Framework mainly for its modern, pick-and-choose style. They have built extensively upon it, extending and leveraging the work accomplished in the open-source Zend Framework community and they now plan on leveraging their new platform to build and manage a large number of new community-based sites for IGN Entertainment.
Challenge
Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a LAMP stack shop, using exclusively open-source based code, but also making use of key enabling tools from Zend, including Zend Studio for Eclipse and the web application server Zend Platform. Indianapolis Motor Speedway wanted faster performance of the sites they manage, and found other libraries too difficult to install, develop with, extend, & deploy.
Solution
Intitially Zend Framework was implemented on their Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix site
and the IMS team found that ZF gave them:
• Easy to modify, extend, and update object-oriented PHP 5 code
• A set of best design pattern practices for building their application
• An education (truly) on how to architect a best-of-breed PHP application
• Best of all, due to removal of a great deal of legacy and unnecessary code lead to page load times that increased over 20%!
Challenge
Fiat needed to quickly bring to market a single-sign-on portal for 1,800 dealers and 2,400 service centers (comprising over 42,000 users) to customize, order, and service Fiat vehicles in 17 countries across Europe. Integrating 15 disparate Fiat applications to communicate with their backend systems was a challenge in any language, but PHP proved to be the rapid turnaround, quick time-to-market "glue" language solution that enabled Fiat to accomplish their goals in short order and with cost savings over other solutions they considered.
Solution
Their Fiatlink system is built on PHP using Zend Core for Oracle with an SAP-RFC connector to their SAP ERP systems, Zend Studio toolkits for their developers, and replacement of their Java web server with a Zend Platform application server using Zend Java Bridge to continue to leverage a 2 person-year investment Fiat already had in Java code. Zend's application server Zend Platform provides a PHP Intelligence feature that helps Fiat track down slow queries to their backend database systems in real-time. They connect to many systems, including a dealer application still in operation, via the easy-to-use web services support that is native to PHP 5.
Challenge
In Ticketing is a full service ticket provider for events worldwide. In-Ticketing has grown rapidly, and needed to rebuild its online ticketing system to accommodate its growth and to enable additional up-sell transactions (often from third-party providers).
Solution
Working with Zend’s Consultants, In-Ticketing was able to leverage Zend Framework and Zend Platform and rebuild its entire ticketing platform. In addition, In-Ticketing’s new transaction engine leverages Zend platform controllers to enhance security and to enable third-party cross- and up-sell transactions.
Challenge
Founded in 2004, social networking website Tagged.com has grown rapidly to more than 60 million users. Tagged has to focus on a high-performing website with fast response times, even while the user base grows by the thousands every month.
Solution
Zend Platform’s smart code caching and performance diagnostics are helping Tagged achieve reliably high performance, even while the website scales and adds new users.Zend Studio is enabling teams of developers to work efficiently on a large, feature-rich code base.
Challenge
Bwin Games is a subsidiary of the bwin Group, the largest publicly traded gaming company in the world. Recent legislation in the U.S. outlawed the activity of online gambling. Consequently, bwin was forced to rapidly pursue other markets, which required complete re-engineering of the website, with internationalization as a top priority.
Solution
Within a 12-month period, bwin adapted and redesigned their English-only site to support multiple languages. Using Zend Framework and with Zend and the PHP community supporting them, bwin Games is now running a €100 million business in Europe that is growing and expanding into new countries every day.
Challenge
When deciding to build QEDWiki IBM had a few key requirements. They wanted the PHP components they built to be widely reused at IBM, they wanted to support multiple databases easily, it was quite important to build on a clean & reliable community-supported framework, and perhaps most importantly they did not want to reinvent the wheel by creating a new framework.
Solution
After looking at a number of other possible solutions, IBM opted for Zend Framework as a key component to build QEDWiki on. Stewart Nickolas, Lead Architect at IBM comments: “Our team saved much time and effort by using Zend Framework’s building blocks on our project. With so many Zend Framework community developers in so many different environments, the code is much cleaner and more reliable, with fewer bugs or defects.”
Challenge
In 2005 Right Media launched the
Right Media Exchange, in which advertisers and publishers buy and sell online ad placements in real time through auctions. Right Media’s 19,000 customers needed a convenient and secure application to interact with the exchange to post ads, create inventory, bid and sell via auction, track results, and so forth. At first Right Media provided their customers a Windows-based desktop application to perform these tasks, but that solution turned out to be unworkable.
Solution
Using Zend Framework and PHP helped Right Media develop an easy to use, rich web application that solved these problems and could be used by all their customers.
Challenge
Consist has over 35 years of experience of deploying mission-critical IT solutions for some of the largest companies and public-sector organizations. Consist began planning for their migration from PHP4 to PHP5, which coincided with new architecture development for their Content Management product, and they saw a perfect opportunity to adopt a supported PHP5 distribution.
Solution
Using Zend Core, Consist was able to meet its long-term infrastructure goals: a trustworthy PHP distribution with a long-term commitment to development and stability that provided timely security updates, a single PHP foundation across development, staging, and production environments, reduction of maintenance costs to only 6 days per year and on-call support.
Challenge
Varien, in business since 2001, has been building e-commerce solutions for major clients for over half the lifetime of e-commerce on the web. Varien had their own homegrown, in-house framework and found themselves with a workable, but not optimal solution. Says Yoav Kutner, CTO at Varien, “We were happy with our framework, but the costs associated with training new developers were not worth it. We needed a professional framework which had support, would continue to evolve outside of our company, and had a strong community of developers already versed in the code.”
Solution
Varien chose to go with industry standard PHP 5 and the new open source Zend Framework to provide them with an extremely simple, object-oriented, and flexible solution that encapsulates best practices, agile & testing methodologies, and that would result in very rapid development of enterprise-grade web applications.
Challenge
Icony is a leader in the online dating business and has over 70 business partners. To sustain these alliances it was necessary for ICONY to develop its proprietary platform to allow their partners to easily integrate with ICONY’s data and functionality. ICONY needed to combine flexible extension support with an ever-expanding scope of potential functionalities.
Solution
ICONY is a business unit of Metropolis AG, a subsidiary of 21TORR. In 1999, 21TORR made the strategic decision and chose to use PHP and Zend Platform to develop their applications because of PHP’s portability, scalability, and short learning curve. Today due to ICONY’s in-depth PHP knowledge 21TORR has become an expert in developing and managing complex Web applications.
Challenge
BEAM.TV wanted to provide quick and easy web-based global services to the advertising and post-production industries to allow clients to collaborate on projects, deliver finished products to their customers, and archive their work on-line.
Solution
BEAM.TV realized they would benefit most from a technology that was as open and flexible as possible. To implement their site, BEAM.TV chose Zend Platform™ primarily for its caching and acceleration capabilities as well as its rapid prototyping, flexible deployment, XML and XSLT integration, session clustering, and minimal downtime.
Challenge
When building Verkkokauppa.com- a fully operational e-commerce site, the company wanted a solution that would allow their website to be easily updated with the latest material about their offerings. Since Verkkokauppa.com’s inventory changes constantly their application must reflect this dynamic state and accommodate the need to develop and update quickly. Verkkokauppa.com also wanted a fully-scalable answer to handle their ever-increasing customer requirements, and a maximum reliability application.
Solution
Choosing PHP to build their application the company was impressed with its functionality and the ease with which it allowed them to launch their site, Verkkokauppa.com used the Zend Studio as a proficient IDE for PHP. The code completion, code analyzer, CVS integration were especially useful during the various development stages and continue to benefit them today. Verkkokauppa.com also deployed the Zend Platform to manage performance and monitor their application. As an added bonus Zend Platform Performance Management maximized their ROI and minimized their operational expenditure.
Challenge
The Foundstone division of McAfee in Southern California focuses on vulnerability management for networks using PHP. For such a complex system in which PHP plays a critical role, it is absolutely necessary for McAfee to have excellent PHP developers. When recruiting PHP programmers for his own team, Plush, the Senior PHP Developer at Foundstone.McAfee found technical skills to often be lacking. Plush and his team needed someone who could “do it now.”
Solution
Zend Certified Engineers. Plush sees that with a Zend Certification diploma, the developer has committed himself to PHP. "When I see someone has Zend Certification, I know right away this person is serious. With Zend Certification, it proves that someone else has verified your PHP skills, and we can move on to other questions.”
Challenge
Ibuildings is a provider of content management systems (CMS), back-office integration, and Web applications and is based in Vlissingen, the Netherlands. Software development in PHP is one of Ibuildings' key areas of expertise. Qualified employees with PHP expertise are extremely important.
Solution
Ibuildings' employers insist on Zend PHP Certification for all its PHP developers. During the recruiting process, Zend PHP Certification is the best tool for identifying PHP experts. Ibuildings views Zend PHP Certification as an important step toward positioning PHP as a serious development platform. In order to meet the strong demand for qualified PHP developers, Zend brought together a group of recognized PHP experts in collaboration with the PHP Education Advisory Board in Fall 2004 to establish the Certification Program.
Challenge
The sueddeutsche.de website is constantly changing as news, ads and other content is removed and added. The company was having difficulty handling such a dynamic environment.
Solution
Sueddeutsche.de chose PHP in 1998 because of its flexibility and speed. Zend Platform monitors each PHP application, reporting each error with full contextual information. The powerful integration with Zend Studio then allows the developers to rapidly code and deploy a fix to the production environment.
Challenge
United Press International (UPI) is a leading provider of critical information to media outlets, businesses, governments and researchers worldwide. The company was using ColdFusion which was working well in regards to application development; however the company was having a difficult time with scalability and uptime.
Solution
UPI stopped using ColdFusion and turned to PHP 5 as their web application language and selected Zend’s products to get the job done. This change has allowed UPI to solve their scalability and uptime issues. The company switched to Zend solutions to ensure reliability and to reduce the probability of production error.
