Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans Named CEO

Congratulations to my friend Andi for becoming Zend Technologies CEO.

You can find the press release below, but I wanted to add a personal note:

Andi is a great guy/husband/father and I am proud to be his friend.
For time to time, he is useful around the house as well:


So - Good luck Andi - Well done.

PS - Maybe now he will get an iPhone and a new car...

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Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans Named Chief Executive Officer

Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans Named Chief Executive Officer
MySQL Veteran Mark Burton Named Zend Executive Chairman

CUPERTINO, Calif. — February 3, 2009 — Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, today announced that it has appointed Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder, as its chief executive officer. Gutmans was most recently senior vice president for R&D and alliances at Zend, as well as chief technical officer. It also named Mark Burton, formerly executive vice president of worldwide sales at MySQL, as executive chairman. Harold Goldberg, who held the position of CEO at Zend Technologies during the past two years, will leave to pursue other opportunities.

Cameron Lester, a Zend director and general partner at Azure Capital Partners remarked: “Zend’s probably the most mature, fast track open source company today. Andi Gutmans’ vision and execution skills have played a key role in guiding the company’s strategy and expansion, and have supported PHP’s phenomenal growth to become the platform of choice for over 20 million Web sites. Business customers—especially in our current environment—are increasingly looking to open-source solutions to deliver both cost benefit and business agility, which is driving increasing opportunity for Zend. With Andi’s appointment as CEO, we are now confident that Zend has the leadership team in place to accelerate the execution of its growth strategy.”

“We are very fortunate to have Mark Burton join Zend as executive chairman,” says Danny Rimer, a Zend director and general partner at Index Ventures. “Mark was part of one of the most successful leadership teams in the history of open-source and there are many parallels between his former company—MySQL— and the strategy Andi has been driving at Zend. Mark will take a very active role and will add considerable operational and commercial depth to the team.”

Andi Gutmans stated, “I am honored to take the leadership role at the company I co-founded years ago, when open-source was in its infancy. Zend’s enterprise-grade PHP solutions and our growing customer roster have increased awareness of the high maturity level of PHP and the efficiencies it brings as most applications move to the Web. Going forward, we will continue to expand our industry-leading solutions for developing and running business-critical PHP applications, work more closely with our partners, and maintain our strong commitment to the open-source community.”

Mark Burton said, “I am thrilled to be joining Zend’s board of directors and am looking forward to working with Andi on realizing Zend’s strategic opportunity. Zend is uniquely positioned to take full advantage of PHP’s growth in driving business critical Web applications.”

About Andi Gutmans
Andi Gutmans has been instrumental in building Zend into the company it is today. In addition to building key partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe, and contributing to major sales engagements, in 2006 he led the company’s largest round of funding to date. Gutmans’ leadership of the company’s open source project Zend Framework has included galvanizing the PHP and enterprise communities around the benefits of standardization and has broadened the professionalism and market reach of PHP and of Zend solutions worldwide.
Gutmans was named one of Computerworld’s “40 innovative IT people to watch, under the age of 40.” He is also recognized from the widely circulated technical publications he has authored and is a frequent speaker on business and technology issues at global conferences. Gutmans is a member of the PHP Group, the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on the board of the Eclipse Foundation. Gutmans holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

About Mark Burton
Mark Burton has 29 years of sales and marketing experience. His past accomplishments include executive sales roles at MySQL AB and Informatica. At MySQL, as EVP of Worldwide Sales and Alliances, he contributed as the sales executive building a worldwide sales engine monetizing the MySQL open source brand and culminating in a $1 billion acquisition by Sun Microsystems in February 2008. At Informatica, Mr. Burton held roles as senior vice president of Americas Sales and eventually group vice president of Worldwide Sales and Alliances. His contribution helped grow Informatica from $12m to over $150m in sales resulting in a successful IPO in April 1999 and a secondary offering in September 2000. Other positions include several vice president of sales and marketing roles in early stage companies, executive-in-residence at Partech International Venture Partners, and regional sales management at Oracle, among others.

Burton was also recently appointed to serve on the board of directors of open-source leaders MuleSource and Infobright as well as on the advisory board for Jaspersoft.

About Zend Technologies, Inc.
Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty million web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Zend Framework, the leading open source PHP framework, has been downloaded over 10 million times and corporate adopters and contributors include Fox Interactive Media, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. Deployed at more than 27,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California.
For more information, please visit http://www.zend.com or call +1 408 253 8800.