As mentioned by Ivo Jansch, Andi Gutmans (of Zend) responded to the recent speculation about a buyout of the company in his keynote address at this year's php|tek conference:

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.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted about the next step in his personal growth on the internet - a personal site/blog of his own over at andigutmans.com.

For years I've wanted to run a personal Web site but never found the time to do it. A couple of weeks ago a few Zenders and I started leasing a dedicated server which gave us each a bit more hosting flexibility. Once we got the machine up and running I decided it was finally time to actually launch my own personal Web site.

He lists the technologies he's using including the Zend Framework, the Zend_Gdata component and the Zend_Cache (for local caching of his blog feeds from Blogger).

As announce on the C7Y website today, Andi Gutmans will be presenting a keynote speech at this year's php|tek 2008 conference.

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.

The speaker list for this year's AjaxWorld Conference & Expo has been announced and one of Zend's own, Andi Gutmans is on the list:

more than a dozen high-caliber speakers lined up by SYS-CON Events to speak in the "RIAs in Action" track at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West taking place next month at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA - one of just ten simultaneous content-rich tracks at biggest version yet of the world's leading AJAX, Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event.

Andi will be giving a talk with Bradford Cottel covering the creation of rich internet applications with the Zend Framework as a backend. They'll introduce the language and how the framework makes it simple to create a rich application, including a demo app.

As mentioned in several places (such as a post on php|architect's website), the list of "40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40" has been released and Zend's own Andi Gutmans has made the list.

From the official press release:

Zend Technologies, Inc., The PHP Company, today announced that IDG's Computerworld, the premier source of IT industry news and analysis, selected Andi Gutmans, co-CTO and co-founder of Zend, as one of its "40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40." Gutmans was selected for the award by a panel of Computerworld editors for his pioneering work with PHP 3, continued work with PHP 4 and 5, advancement of business critical rich internet applications, further development of PHP and Java integration, and, most recently, significant contributions to the open source collaboration project Zend Framework.

You can read more about Andi and the other nominees over in the ComputerWorld article highlighting him and the 39 other honorees.

Nick Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the "Top 10 Programmers of All Time".

My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.

You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

The Zend Developer Zone points to a new podcast done from the Dr. Dobbs Journal folks with Jon Erickson talking to Andi Gutmans of Zend about a wide range of PHP topics:

In this 5 minute podcast, Jon and Andi talk about a wide variety of topics. They touch on PHP Scalability, Web Services, Zend Framework and how Zend implemented the Lucene search engine in PHP.

Cal also mentions their discussion of the BIRT reporting functionality that is newly integrated with the Zend Platform product.

You can grab the full podcast here.

According to this new post on the Inside Open Source blog from APress, Andi Gutmas has made a for a new syntax to be added to the existing array functionality in PHP.

Cal Evans has posted a quick note over on the Zend Developer Zone about a podcast that Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans participated in for RedMonk Radio.

Andi is featured in episode #33 of RedMonk radio. In it James and Conte quiz Andi about PHP on the IBM System i, scalability, The Microsoft partnership, and a host of other topics.

They honed in on the System i stuff and mention how Java, one thought to be the perfect fit for the platform, has fallen short.

You can grab the podcast directly from here or, if you want to find out more about the RedMonk Podcast, check out their site.

In an effort to spread the word even more about the partnerships that Zend is doing with Microsoft and IBM, the crew over at InfoWorld have posted a new interview they did with Andi Gutmans at the (just passed) Zend/PHP Conference & Expo about the situation.

Andi Gutmans, a cofounder of the company and its vice president of technology, spoke with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill this week at the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo in San Jose, Calif., about PHP, the company's blockbuster deal with Microsoft, and other happenings.

They talk about the significance of the move, the role Zend is going to play, how PHP compares and fits in the market, Zend's IDE project, and the IBM work that's being done.