Andi Gutmans takes the reins at Zend Technologies as Harold Goldberg departs the PHP tools company Zend Technologies, maker of tools for PHP application development, has named company co-founder Andi Gutmans as its new chief executive officer, the company is announcing on Tuesday.The company also named Mark Burton, formerly executive vice president of worldwide sales at MySQL, as executive chairman.Exiting Zend is Harold Goldberg, who had served as CEO the past two years. Zend said he will leave to pursue other opportunities. Gutmans, who most recently served as chief technical officer and senior vice president of research and development and alliances at Zend, in a statement said he was “honored” to take the leadership role at the company he co-founded.“Zend’s enterprise-grade PHP solutions and our growing customer roster have increased awareness of the high maturity level of PHP and the efficiencies it brings as most applications move to the Web. Going forward, we will continue to expand our industry-leading solutions for developing and running business-critical PHP applications, work more closely with our partners and maintain our strong commitment to the open-source community,” Gutmans said.Gutmans also is a member of the PHP Group, the Apache Software Foundation and a board member of the Eclipse Foundation. Gutmans’s ascendance to the CEO slot was endorsed by Zend director Cameron Lester, also general partner at Azure Capital Partners.“Zend’s probably the most mature, fast track open source company today. Andi Gutmans’s vision and execution skills have played a key role in guiding the company’s strategy and expansion and have supported PHP’s phenomenal growth to become the platform of choice for over 20 million Web sites,” Lester said in a statement released by Zend. “Business customers—especially in our current environment—are increasingly looking to open-source solutions to deliver both cost benefit and business agility, which is driving increasing opportunity for Zend. With Andi’s appointment as CEO, we are now confident that Zend has the leadership team in place to accelerate the execution of its growth strategy.”Burton, meanwhile, will take a very active role and add considerable operational and commercial depth to the Zend team, Zend said. Software DevelopmentDevelopment ToolsTechnology Industry