ZendCon ’09 is two weeks away!

Speaker: Andi Gutmans
Bio: Andi Gutmans co-founded Zend Technologies and has been instrumental in making Zend into the company it is today. In addition to building key partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe, and contributing to major customer & 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 has also been a lead contributor to PHP since 1997, when he and Zeev Suraski developed the foundation for PHP 3 and later co-founded Zend Technologies together. PHP 3 was a turning point for the language, which today powers over 20 million websites including Facebook and Yahoo! and enjoys a following of over 5 million developers. 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 the Eclipse Foundation, as well as serving on the board of Zend Technologies. Gutmans holds a bachelor’s in computer science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Keynote Title: PHP at the Heart of Mainstream IT
Keynote Abstract: These are exciting times for PHP and Zend. The economic downturn put pressure on IT budgets but at the same time accelerated the adoption of open source. Is it time to declare PHP as an equal-rights citizen in mainstream corporate IT? What about enterprise Java? How will Cloud computing change the way we build and manage PHP applications? And how does Zend Play into the changing landscape of web applications? Join Andi Gutmans, Zend’s co-founder and CEO for this keynote kickoff of ZendCon.

Speaker: Scott Baker
Bio: Scott Baker is the Vice President of Operations at Digg, the popular social media site that harnesses the collective wisdom of the world’s online audience to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Web. He is responsible for managing Digg’s technology infrastructure, including overseeing the network equipment and datacenters that run Digg, which now gets nearly 40 million visitors a month. Prior to joining Digg in March, 2006, Baker worked as Manager of Internet Services for Apple’s Global Network Services group. He managed Apple’s customer-facing networks, including Mac.com and the iTunes Music Store. He also held various networking and IT positions at The Boston Consulting Group, Intraspect and ION, as well as Director of Network Services for Playboy Enterprises/playboy.com.

Keynote Title: A Series of Fortunate Events, or how we learned to stop kicking the cable
Keynote Abstract: Scott Baker, Vice President, Operations, at digg.com shares anecdotes and lessons in scaling and redundancy from his tours of duty with some very large Internet sites (playboy.com, apple.com, digg.com). You’ll get a brief history of how Internet operations have evolved, how digg works today, and a preview of where we might be going tomorrow. There may be clouds involved, but not so much Sun.

Speakers: Cloud Panelists

Keynote Title: Developing on the Cloud
Keynote Abstract: A number of cloud luminaries from Zend, IBM, Microsoft and RightScale will discuss the current state of cloud technologies, what the future holds, and how PHP development will be impacted by it.