Zend Core 2.0 is the company's first general release of its software for multiple platforms, said Vishwanath Venugopalan, analyst for enterprise software at The 451 Group. Zend is addressing an enterprise need for a supported, certified implementation of PHP, he said.

"PHP is a great open source Web development environment and it's obviously built up a pretty big community," said Venugopalan.

"But most enterprises who use PHP today have to download the open source version of PHP and then have to do some additional work to deploy it in their environment," he added.

Zend, with its ability to build and deploy on Windows, addresses issues of developers having to deal with subtle differences when an application is built on one platform and deployed on another, Venugopalan said.

Also featured in Zend Core 2.0 is Zend Framework, with preconfigured PHP components for building Web applications that perform functions such as database access, Web services interfacing, and search.