IBM: 'LAMP' users need to grow up
According to Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM's Rational division, LAMP -- the popular Web development stack -- works well for basic applications but lacks the ability to scale.
"If you look at the history of LAMP development, they're really primative tools ... the so-called good enough model. The type of businesses being created around those particular business models are essentially going to have to grow up at some point.
"I believe that in the same way that some of those simple solutions are good enough to start with, eventually, they are going to have to come up against scalability," Sabbah said during a press conference at the IBM Rational User Conference in Las Vegas.
While Sabbah was critical of LAMP's capabilities, he said IBM is going to ensure companies which started with that model will be able to "grow and change with the rest of the world".
He believes most businesses want technology that is stable, evolutionary, historical and had support.
"What we are trying to do is make sure businesses who start there [with LAMP] have a model, to not only start there but evolve into more complex situations in order to actually be able to grow," he said.
According to research firm Netcraft, PHP is the most popular language for LAMP development and currently accounts for more than 40 percent of the overall Web scripting language market.
Sabbah said LAMP will be core to IBM's future software strategy but was tight-lipped on specifics. However, he told Builder AU that the company is looking to do more with the open source PHP programming language, and Zend Technologies, a firm that invests heavily in the development of PHP.
In February, Big Blue announced a partnership with Zend to create a bundle called ZendCore -- which includes IBM's Cloudscape embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools.
"You've seen us do a lot with PHP and Zend and you'll see us do more. I can't say more. It [PHP] needs to integrate with enterprise assets but it needs to remember where it came from and where its value was. It can't start getting too complex as it will lose its audience," Sabbah said.
Brendon Chase travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of IBM.