Microsoft jumped on one of the geekier trends powering the Web 2.0 craze Tuesday. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant entered into a partnership with Zend Technologies to optimize the performance of its Windows servers for the PHP web programming language that Zend packages and sells.

The move is part of a growing shift at Microsoft, observers say, toward taking advantage of technologies not developed inside the Redmond, Washington-based software giant. Microsoft entered into the agreement Tuesday at Zend’s annual PHP conference in San Jose, California.

PHP, which stands for Personal Home Page or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a popular open source web programming language used by scores of developers to create dynamic web pages. With this agreement, the PHP scripting language will run more efficiently on Windows Server 2003 as well as the next version of Windows server codenamed “Longhorn.”

Until now, PHP has been optimized to run on the open source Linux operating system as well as Sun’s Solaris operating system. With the announcement, Cupertino, California-based Zend also said that it will better integrate PHP with the open source database MySQL.

Being open source, PHP is free, but Zend offers products and services for developing and deploying PHP applications. Their development tool, Zend Studio, is widely used by developers who write PHP applications.

Zend’s business model is to give away an open-source scripting engine and sell a “closed-source” line of PHP development tools. Its main competition comes from PHP.net, a site where developers download free PHP tools.

“Zend aims to make it very easy to deploy reliable and high performance PHP 5 across all leading computing platforms, and improving integration with MySQL and Windows was high on our list of priorities,” said Mard de Visser, Zend’s chief marketing officer in a statement.

The PHP language is very popular with so-called Web 2.0 companies, such as Tagged and Facebook. Today, about 20 million web sites worldwide are driven by PHP, out of which 15,000 are Zend customers.

The language is used 10 times as often as other web-friendly programming languages such as Java, .Net, and Cold Fusion, said Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst with the Burton Group.

It is very easy to learn, the barriers to entry are very low, and has a healthy ecosystem that make it a popular language to adopt especially for small and medium sized businesses, he said.

“[Microsoft] is working with Zend so that they can sell their operating systems to businesses that depend on PHP,” Mr. Monson-Haefel said. “And for Zend it makes sense to make Microsoft recognize what they are doing and working to optimize it to [Windows].”

PHP’s major disadvantage is that if customers’ web sites grow to a large size, it can be hard to maintain compared to other platforms.

However, on a higher level, Mr. Monson-Haefel said this agreement shows that Microsoft is opening up to new technologies that are developed outside of its realm. In the past, the company has been known for not supporting technologies that it doesn’t make.

“It shows some maturity on Microsoft to show that there is an environment that can run their operating system just as effectively as their own ASP .Net [technology]; this shows that there are some other technologies that add more value and help them sell more of their operating system,” he said.

Zend, which has strong Israeli roots, has been funded with $36.7 million so far with investors like Greylock Partners, Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures, and Walden Israel Venture Capital.

Contact the writer: FBhuta@RedHerring.com

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