I think the power is not only in support, but also in the bundling; though you could argue that if that is the added value, then integrating open source solutions would be a better, cheaper alternative for Zend.

Regarding the marketing: I think Zend is trying to address the mass market. And the majority of PHP developers is not at a level whree queueing systems are well known or common practice. The majority of PHP developers struggle with simple problems such as performance, and the way Zend explains the Job Queue might be appealing to those not yet familiar with a message queue but vaguely aware that taking things out of the main dispatch loop of your application might improve performance. A conflict in their marketing efforts however is that its pricing is definitely not targeted at the masses. It’s an ‘enterprise product line’ and though their press releases support that claim, most enterprise users are fairly capable of installing and integrating the open source components.

Interesting challenge for them. Would be nice to get a response from their marketing or management team to get their views.

As for just about any message queuing type solution, they are essentially wrapping additional software and then providing a GUI to this (at least I would hope so). Providing services is ultimately the goal that I foresee. Say I get the director of technology at my desk stating how can we ensure we have support from a company behind the language, the answer is simple, get Zend involved. However, asking me to use their IDE which only has a few simple things that I can get elsewhere and/or using the professional edition for several thousand a year when we already have most things configured idealistically is unreal. Being a service company on the other hand shows more potential value and reason to come on board with potential solutions.

Thanks for the article Marco!

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/108-Distributing-PHP-processing-with-Gearman.html

That said, I agree with you that many of Zend customers only pay those license fees for Zend server to have peace of mind regarding the eventual need of support to solve problems that they cannot figure.

However, I also think that many IT departments that buy products from Zend else and other similar IT suppliers do not have the time or experience to find Open Source solutions that exist and can even provide a much more reliable solution for certain problems, like Gearman provides.

Actually, you did not even mention Gearman as a solution for long running job queuing solution. I suppose even you were not aware that Gearman could be used for the same purpose as Zend job queueing.

That is all right, nobody knows everything. I just think that many of IT suppliers like Zend are taking advantage of the ignorance of many of their customers about alternative solutions. I see that as a marketing deficiency of Open Source project developers that did not invest enough to have their Open Source products as well known among the corporate IT clients.

There is pretty large market of companies who don’t have the right staff in-house to implement the open-source alternatives. It’s easier/more reliable/cheaper for that company to purchase a product than get one of their developers to implement and open-source solution. It sounds shocking that companies are not able to install APC on their own servers, but I’ve worked for ones where they hadn’t even heard of opcode caching.

I suppose it could be compared with food: we all have access to cheap raw ingredients that could be turned into delicious meals by a skilled chef… but often we take the easy route and buy the pre-prepared stuff.