In about 15 minutes, Andi Gutmans is about to kick off ZendCon 09 with his opening keynote. Yesterday during the tutorial day and this morning over breakfast, I've been polling people to see what big announcements they expect this year. "Microsoft buys Zend" and other fun but improbable announcements aside, here's a selection of what people think might be announced today:

• Zend Certification for PHP 5.3
• Zend Framework 2.0
• a Google AppEngine for PHP
• Zend Studio Certification
• Zend Server for OSX
• Zend Server Enterprise Edition

If you follow me on Twitter, I'll probably mention any specific announcements there realtime.

I was just at a very interesting keynote by Microsoft's Joe Stagner. He had some interesting news, so I didn't want to wait until my next php|tek daily report to blog about this.

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

The most important tidbits from this sessions were:

• According to Joe, Microsoft is not done talking to Yahoo. They'll need a way to align their cultural differences, but talks aren't over.

• Microsoft has no plans to buy Zend.

The second point was confirmed in Andi's keynote yesterday, so that's probably the truth. The first part however was new to me. Joe calls himself 'Microsoft's Opinionated Misfit Geek', which probably means that microsoft is able to deny anything that Joe states. But on twitter someone pointed me to this article which confirms this story.

There were also some discussions regarding how Microsoft and Zend are working together to improve PHP on windows, which lead to some comments from Derick Rethans and others that these improvements were closed source parts of Zend Core, but Stas from Zend argued against that and stated that all Zend's fixes to PHP are contributed back.

In any case, Joe's talk was a very interesting keynote that raised some controversy among the audience.

As expected, Andi Gutmans started his phptek opening keynote with a response to the recent news on the layoffs in the Zend R&D team.

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

Andi was not heckled by the audience, no tough questions were asked (only a handful of the audience had read the news anyway it appeared).

Tomorrow I'm doing a webinar for Zend: I will be talking about migrating from PHP4 to PHP5. I won't go into the technical details so much, but I will talk about why to migrate and how to migrate. I will talk about both the benefits and the risks.

It's at 9.00 am PDT (18:00 CET), and you can enroll through the Zend site. (It's free )

Oh and it's live, so you have the opportunity to ask questions.