Thanks to all of you who have commented about what the i community needs. We’ll be coming back to that topic and the related topic of COMMON in future posts, so please keep those thoughts coming in.
This week we’re taking a look at an interesting executive we met recently-–Andi Gutmans, co-founder and CEO of Zend Technologies-–the PHP company. Actually, we didn’t really meet him in person. He was at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nev. Everyone at COMMON had a good chance to see him since he appeared on stage in the opening session when he was interviewed by Jeff Howard, IBM marketing manager for Power Systems.
To us, the Gutmans interview was, by far, the most interesting part of Howard’s presentation. That’s partly because much of what Jeff talked about was hardware related (yawn) and, of course, our primary interest is in programming. Plus, as you know, we have become PHP fans in recent months, so the chance to see and hear Zend’s CEO was bound to pique our interest.
He didn’t disappoint. The first obvious impression was his youth (at under 35, we’d hazard a guess he was younger than at least 75 percent of the audience that day) yet he spoke with a wisdom we’d love to hear from many IBM executives. He came across as genuinely excited about the partnership with IBM and the community of IBM i developers. Of course, since some 14,000 IBM i users have downloaded Zend Core to develop and/or run PHP applications, he has good reason to be excited! And with the renewal of the Zend/IBM agreement, Zend Core is now being shipped with all new IBM i systems.
We were most impressed with the fact that Gutmans clearly "gets" i. He’s not an i guy by experience, but he has made sure to meet with many i folks one-on-one to understand what makes us tick. He seems truly interested in what Zend can do to make the partnership between PHP and the i community stronger. He listens and pays attention and that was obvious in the COMMON interview. He talked about the similarities between the PHP and RPG communities, the synergy between PHP and RPG and why he thinks many RPGers have embraced PHP as a way to move forward with their applications.
We were so busy in Reno that we weren’t able to meet face-to-face with Gutmans on site, but we had the opportunity to talk to him by phone a few days after we got home. The discussion we had was frank and practical. He wasn’t interested in hearing about how wonderful things were with PHP on i. He mostly wanted to know what Zend could do to make the partnership better. When Jon mentioned the unfortunately ugly state of the current API interface for calling RPG programs, he was neither offended nor defensive, as many executives from other companies we’ve talked to in the past have been. Instead, he wanted to understand what was wrong with it and immediately began to suggest ways in which Zend might be able to do something to make the interface more intuitive and easier to use.
How refreshing. A software company executive who seeks out users of his product to find out from the trenches what’s wrong with it so he can find ways to fix the problems. More importantly, an executive who cares enough to find out what makes his audience tick-–and from what we’ve seen, Gutmans gets it. Let's hope a few of IBM's software executives were listening--it seems to us that they could take a few lessons from Mr. Gutmans.
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