[ossig] The hoarse whisperer: PHP and the enterprise myth

[Ditesh <ditesh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

http://blogs.phparch.com/mt/index.php?p=29


--- The hoarse whisperer: PHP and the enterprise myth

by Marco Tabini

I wish we could all stop arguing about whether PHP is “enterprise ready” 
for a moment and wonder whether anyone actually cares. I think that this 
is a completely pointless discussion for two reasons:

    * It’s been demonstrated that PHP is enterprise-ready. Why? Because
      there are hundreds of enterprises–big and small–that use it
      successfully.
    * It’s a fact that techies are about the most opinionated people in
      the galaxy. None of us is going to sway anyone from their
      religious beliefs.

Thus, let’s focus on putting our money where our collective mouth is. 
For my part, I think there are two reasons why PHP isn’t enterprise 
ready *where it matters*:

1- There aren’t enough PHP developers to fill all the jobs that are 
available

2- There are no resources aimed at reaching the people who matter

That there aren’t enough good PHP developers is a fact–I’m not making it 
up or letting my rapidly advancing age turn up the crankiness knob. I 
must get at least two or three calls a week from head hunters all over 
the place that are directed to our website as a resource for advanced 
PHP developers and ask me (with a bit of desperation in their voice) 
where they can find good developers with solid programming experience.

Please understand that I don’t mean to say that PHP developers are 
generally stupid–rather, that the number of developers with enough 
experience to build a solid enterprise-class application are simply 
fewer than the number of jobs available. Thus, while there are some 
really well-paying PHP positions around, a lot of them go unclaimed 
because there aren’t enough people who can rise to the challenge.

This phenomenon is strictly connected with cause number two, because, as 
anyone who has ever had the pleasure of running a company will tell you, 
talent goes where the money is, and the money (together with the 
decisional power) is in the hands of people that all of the discussions 
we as a technical community have been having won’t reach even if we 
start picketing their office buildings and stalking them on their way 
home at night.

The people who hold all the keys are *business* folks, who, 
incidentally, are also the most dramatically underserved category by the 
PHP documentation available on the Internet (in fact, if they by any 
chance manage to stumble across a high-level IT document that deals with 
PHP, they’ll likely end up reading the brainchild of some dunghead who 
can’t even spell his name, let alone write a proper technology review). 
The result of all this is an unqualified disaster, and a huge rubber 
wall of indifference that one has to get through before he can even 
present PHP as an alternative to more mainstream enterprise staples (I 
often like to refer to PHP as the “mainstream alternative,” since it’s a 
lot more popular than most of the other web technologies combined–and 
yet most business people have never heard nothing about it).

The fault, here, is no-one’s but ours. The PHP team has a great set of 
technical resources available on the web, but no business resources at 
all (I’m sure most of the team will say that business resources are not 
their domain, but I disagree–given the opportunity, php.net would be a 
great place where advocacy at a business level could start). We all need 
more resources that can help us present our platform, which we know can 
handle the requirements of an enterprise-class application, at a level 
that IT management can understand.

Here are a few thoughts on ways that can help us accomplish this goal:

1- Acceptance by precedent: lots of large companies these days use PHP, 
but way too many of them are not “out of the closet.” Urban legends 
dictate that big companies are afraid to proclaim that they use PHP, but 
I think that they simply don’t care–and they, for sure, can claim that 
that’s not their job. Getting case studies together would be a great way 
to showcase PHP’s penetration of the industry and bootstrap its 
acceptance in the enterprise space

2- Outlining the business advantages of PHP. We all know about the 
openness and the power of the platform, but how do those items translate 
into an effect on the bottom line?

3- Providing resources for advocacy. The AFUP (the French PHP User 
Group) has taken a very good first step in this direction, which was 
presented by Damien Seguy at php|works; AFUP has come up with a pamphlet 
called “PHP White Paper” that outlines some of the business benefits of 
PHP in a way that is coherent and useful to the consulting firm who 
approaches a prospective client.. The paper has been picked up by PHP 
Quebec here in Canada; they have produced a localized French-Canadian 
version, and Damien has mentioned that he’s working on an English 
version as well.

4- Bringing the benefits to the enterprise. Remember that we’re up 
against companies with very-well funded marketing departments–there’s a 
reason why all those IT management magazines I get stuffed through my 
front door once a week are free. This doesn’t mean that we can’t get 
into the enterprise without spending millions of dollars ourselves–we 
just need to do it in a smarter way: by educating the right people and 
providing them with the backing they need to make PHP succeed. If you 
look at most of the “success stories” of PHP within the enterprise, 
you’ll notice that they’ve been heralded by insiders (like Michael 
Radwin at Yahoo!) who already had a passion for PHP and brought it to 
the attention of the management (who, in Yahoo!’s case, promptly 
realized its benefits and proceeded to snatch two of the best PHP 
developers from the open market).

5- Advocate PHP outside of the techie circuit. As long as we continue to 
praise PHP in front of a PHP audience, we’ll be preaching to the choir. 
We should try, instead, to make PHP and LAMP show up at events that, 
although connected with IT, are not LAMP-specific. There are some 
terrific speakers in our community who also happen to be very savvy 
businesspeople and entrepreneurs–they should be out evangelizing PHP in 
front of non-PHP crowds.

These are nothing more than a handful of ideas, but they are a starting 
point. Personally, I feel that our energies would be better directed in 
these areas than dedicating ourselves to the onirism of deciding whether 
our language is better than someone else’s.

Ditesh


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