Harold Goldberg Joins Zend as CEO

January 16, 2007; 03:54 AM
Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today announced that Harold Goldberg has joined the company as CEO. He joins Zend, a venture-backed open source software company, from BMC Software, a $1.5 billion global provider of enterprise systems and service management solutions, where he was senior vice president of worldwide marketing. Goldberg is assuming leadership of Zend at a time when adoption of PHP for fast, flexible software development by both emerging Web 2.0 companies and large corporations is accelerating globally.

At BMC Software, Goldberg was elected as a corporate officer by the board of directors and played a key role in defining the company’s “Business Service Management” strategy, including the acquisitions of Remedy, Magic Solutions, Viadyne and Marimba. Prior to BMC, Goldberg spent 18 years in senior strategy, sales and marketing roles at Remedy, Siemens Information and Communication Networks and Peregrine Systems.

“I am truly fortunate to be joining the strong team already in place at Zend,” said Goldberg. “The company is on a sharp growth trajectory being fueled by both the acceptance of open source, and the trend toward new, service oriented programming models. I am eager to start work to capture the market opportunity and be part of a fundamental shift happening in the software industry.”

“Zend and PHP make it easy for companies to turn great ideas into reality,” said Marc Andreessen, Zend board member and co-founder of Ning. “Web application development is getting better and faster all the time and Harold is uniquely qualified to ensure that Zend expands its leadership position and delivers great value to its customers and shareholders.”

"The CEO search committee established extremely demanding criteria for candidates that included experience in growing a global business, a strong track record in business software and an appetite for disruptive markets and technologies," said Cameron Lester, founding general partner with Azure Capital Partners. "There were a number of qualified candidates, but Harold was a perfect fit, and we could tell that he would mesh culturally with the company."

Goldberg is joining Zend shortly after the company’s November Zend/PHP Conference surpassed all previous attendance records. Zend also announced agreements deepening its relationships with IBM, Google and MySQL, and a partnership with Microsoft to significantly extend the reach of PHP on the Windows platform. Zend was founded by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, both leading contributors to the open source PHP project. The company is backed by Azure Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital.

About Zend

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty-two million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend Technologies, Inc. is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.