But, he notes, the strength of the PHP open-source community is very important to Zend's fortunes. "We're talking about using open source to develop the primary code" for our product, he said.

Maybe embracing PHP on the Azure platform was inevitable, maybe it was just a smart move. The question is, will interoperability with open source PHP make enough of a difference to matter.

Its community grew 27% year on year, adding 20.5 million users in the past year. The company claims 90% of companies now use open source, and that 90% of the Fortune 100 use GitHub.