The CTO at Rogue Wave Software, Zeev Suraski, says he's never seen anything like PHP 7 in the software space—namely the halving of hardware needs after a mostly painless software upgrade. Organizations salivating to leverage this massive performance gain would be wise to investigate Zend Server 9, an application server that builds on the benefits of PHP 7, both on-premises and in the cloud.

This new version of Zend Server also offers code tracing and black box recording, making it an effortless process to perform root-cause analysis. Another key feature is Z-Ray, a developer toolkit that accelerates developer productivity by displaying all of the under-the-hood details of a page request across all the PHP scripts involved in building a page. Finally, with Zend Server 9, Rogue Wave introduces Zend Server Professional Plus and Zend Server Enterprise Plus editions that offer customers expert support for the open-source stack underlying the Zend Server-hosted PHP application.