Zend Brings Zend Server 8.5 Community-Driven Innovation to Microsoft Azure

Gallery Includes Add-ons and Plugins for WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, Redis, OPcache, Doctorine2 and Popular Frameworks

Cupertino, Calif. – September 1, 2015 – Zend, the PHP company, today announced that Zend Server 8.5, its newest leading professional PHP distribution offering, is now available on Microsoft Azure.  The new version, which features Zend’s new gallery of community-driven add-ons, brings a new ecosystem of innovation around Z-Ray and Zend Server to Azure. Z-Ray provides unrivaled visibility into application performance. The new Zend Gallery delivers unlimited extensibility and innovation to an active community of developers, giving them increased visibility into PHP-based applications and frameworks.

“Today’s PHP development teams are looking to maximize productivity and performance. Zend, with Zend Server, anticipates and meets these developer requirements, offering new features and capabilities that expedite development and strengthen performance,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend. “The combination of an open gallery and feature-rich PHP distribution with a highly reliable and scalable cloud platform empowers developers with one-stop access to the extensions and plugins they need to build higher quality web and mobile applications faster, including in the cloud.”

“We welcome the addition of Zend Server 8.5 and its new community-driven gallery of plugins to our Microsoft Azure Marketplace,” said Nicole Herskowitz, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure.  “Zend Server provides a professional and optimized PHP distribution for developers. Enabling access to Zend Server will increase overall support for PHP-based frameworks and applications, while helping developers build quality, scalable applications quickly in the cloud.”

The new Zend Gallery aggregates and organizes all Z-Ray extensions and Zend Server plugins in an easy-to-use interface. Developers can now access the growing ecosystem of Z-Ray extensions for frameworks, applications, databases or technologies, as well as new Zend Server plugins, simply and easily from a single interface.

New extensions allow PHP developers to create plugins to extend and customize Zend Server with additional features.  Z-Ray, the ultimate PHP productivity solution, is integrated with Zend Server to enable in-depth insight into application code and performance. This latest release includes new plugins for Joomla, Doctrine2, Redis, OPcache, MariaDB, and LoS Modules. Also included are enhanced plugins for WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Zend Framework, Apigility, Laravel and Symfony.

"As a Joomla community member and Z-Ray for Joomla extension developer, I welcome Zend's new plugins gallery," said Jisse Reitsma, founder and lead developer of Yireo.  "Our new extension to the gallery will make it a lot easier for developers to create high-performing Joomla apps, and I expect many other apps and frameworks will follow.”

Zend Server 8.5 new features include:

• Live support functionality to troubleshoot end-user issues in real time
• Redesigned UI for a superior user experience
• App and framework specific built-in routing support
• New Xdebug support
• Notifications about the environment displayed directly in Z-Ray
• Improved performance and lower memory consumption
• Increased granularity control of the data collected by Z-Ray
• New plugins display with multiple panels now consolidated under one top-level panel
• New capability to perform server-side actions from Z-Ray
• Multiple queues management

Zend Server 8.5 is available pre-installed on the Azure Marketplace today. It is available in three editions, Developer, Professional and Enterprise.  

About Zend Server

Zend Server is one of the most complete professional PHP distribution with advanced value-add capabilities. Zend Server includes more than 80 tested PHP extensions and has added features designed to optimize productivity, performance, scalability and reliability. Enterprise-grade capabilities include built-in job queue, caching management, monitoring and root cause analysis, optimal scalability and reliability with H/A session clustering, multi-server management, unmatched DevOps features, and now a new open gallery.  The new Zend Gallery includes a fast-growing number of plugins and extensions, many contributed by the PHP community.

Zend Server supports any and all PHP code; any code you have in PHP will run on Zend Server.

About Zend Technologies

Zend, the PHP company, was founded by the co-authors of PHP and continues as a dominant entity behind PHP, with open source contributions such as Zend Framework, Apigility and most recently, PHPNG, the engine of PHP 7. Zend is also the leading provider of enterprise-grade PHP solutions and support for development leaders, DevOps and developers. Our customers use Zend Server with Z-Ray, Zend Studio and Zend Guard to improve application performance and quality, speed up their release cycles and mitigate risk. We let you focus on innovation rather than using cycles to manage the stack and troubleshoot issues. Join Zend’s leading customers such as BNP Paribas, Best Buy, GE, Prada and other leading brands worldwide. Visit us at www.zend.com.