I've blogged about our visit to the Zend offices before, and back then I was not able to disclose yet what we did there. We can finally speak openly about it.

Zend, in an effort to better serve the Dutch market with a local presence, has selected Ibuildings to be their official representative in The Netherlands. This means that we are going to support the Dutch PHP community with the entire Zend product range, training and support offerings.

This is a big step for us, and I think it is a great reward for having provided professional PHP development services over the last years. I'm very excited about the partnership, the people I've met at Zend in the last months are all great people, and I think we will have a fruitful relationship for all parties involved.

You can read the official announcement in Dutch on our site here:

Dutch press release on ibuildings.nl

and in English on the zend.com site:

English press release on zend.com

Last week, my coworkers from Ibuildings; Tom, Ludo, Jan-Willem and I visited Israel to meet with people from Zend.

I cannot disclose yet what we discussed there (expect some announcements soon), but I wanted to share with you what a great week we had, and what great people the Zenders are. Here's a report of our visit.

We arrived in our hotel (Dan Panorama) in Tel Aviv on sunday morning, around 3 a.m. When I woke at around 7, my head told me to turn around and get some more sleep, but I noticed light shining past the curtains, and I was too curious not to get up and have a look (I've never been to Israel before). When I opened the curtain, this was what I saw:

I couldn't suppress a 'Wow!' and I was wide awake. Since it was way to early to have breakfast, I went for a walk along the beach. Tel Aviv was nothing like I had imagined. It reminded me of Italy. Perfect weather, nice people, great!

That sunday was Jewish New Year's day, so we didn't have to work yet, and Idan and Uval from Zend picked us up and took us to Jerusalem. Although both of them apparently did not know the way (they nearly drove us to Gaza ), we eventually got there and they showed us around in the Old City in Jerusalem. Christian places, Arab places, Jewish places, a nice mix of cultures and beliefs. They also introduced us to 'hummus':

Zend's Idan is on the left, Uval is on the right.

In the evening, Zeev invited us for dinner in Tel Aviv. Zeev is a great guy, and it was nice to meet him in person and to be able to talk to him about his ideas and about the past, present and future of PHP and Zend.

From left to right: Jan-Willem, Zeev, me, Idan, Tom and Ludo.

From monday to friday, we had lots of meetings and met a lot of people from Zend. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to take pictures there. All of them were very nice guys and girls, and we really enjoyed our stay. Roy acted as our Tel Aviv Bar Guide and made sure that we had good food and drinks in nice bars each night.

The last night, we went out in Tel Aviv Ports, where Uval made a waitress get on a picture with us, to prove at home how beautiful Israeli girls are:

On saturday morning, after a nice game of pool where we beat Uval and Idan , our trip was over, and we went for the airport. Several hours of security checks (by far the toughest checks I've seen on airports so far) later, our plane took off.

I look back on a great week, where we met interesting people, and have come to know Israel as a very nice and welcoming country. Before we came, Uval told us "you will experience first hand the difference between CNN and reality", and that was very true. Israel was a lot more beautiful than I had imagined.

I'd like to thank all the people at Zend we've met, and especially Idan and Uval, who acted as our personal guides to Israel and Zend in particular. And ofcourse Zeev for inviting us to dinner. I'm looking forward to the-things-I-can't-talk-about-yet and I will make sure I will visit Israel some time again. If only to give them a chance to beat us at pool (practise guys, practise; that pool table in your office is there for a reason )

The rest of the pictures I took are here. Ludo's pictures are here. Tom made some video's, which will probably be online somewhere soon too.

Sorry for the shameless plug, but I'm too proud not to mention this.

We are featured on the frontpage of Zend.com. They've written a case study about us, because we decided to let all our developers take the Zend Certification exam.

Also I would like to remind you that later this afternoon there will be a webcast on zend.com where I'll be talking about why we support the certification program.

Update: The webcast is already available. Unfortunately, due to the fact we were using phone lines, and due to compression, the sound quality is poor. Add to that my dutch accent and my talking speed (come on, it's my very first webcast ), and I'm almost impossible to understand.
I contacted Zend to see if they could do anything about it (less compression, different editing), but this was unfortunately not possible. They will post a textual transcription soon to compensate.

In my previous entry I already talked about how 9 of our employees already were certified, and that 3 were coming up. Right now, we have 12 ZCE's, which makes us the number 1 certified company in The Netherlands. Whoot!

For this reason, Zend invited me to take part in their webcast about the PHP Job Market on august 24. I'm looking forward to it. If all goes well, there will also be a case study about ibuildings on Zend.com soon.

Some other bits of news: we've attracted 2 sponsors for the Achievo project management tool. The next few months we will be building quite some interesting features, among which finally a completion of the billing module, an Open Office export/template feature, an upgrade to ATK5 and parts of the 'task based time-registration' we've been planning for almost 2 years now.

The next release of ATK is around the corner. I've got some contributed translations to add, but besides that, the next release is almost ready.