Andi Gutmans

Andi Gutmans in 2015.

Andi (Andrei^[1]) Gutmans is a programmer and entrepreneur, born in Switzerland and currently residing in the United States. He helped to co-create PHP, and co-founded Zend Technologies^[2] and is a VP Engineering, Databases at Google. A graduate of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Gutmans and fellow student Zeev Suraski created PHP 3 in 1997. In 1999 they wrote the Zend Engine, the core of PHP 4, and founded Zend Technologies, which has since overseen PHP advances, including the PHP 5 ^[3] and most recent PHP 7 releases. The name Zend is a portmanteau of their forenames, Zeev and Andi.^[4]

Gutmans served as CEO of Zend Technologies until October 2015 when Zend was acquired by Rogue Wave Software. Before being appointed CEO in February 2009,^[5] he led Zend's R&D including development of all Zend products and Zend's contributions to the open-source Zend Framework and PHP Development Tools projects. He has participated at Zend in its corporate financing and has also led alliances with vendors like Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.^[2]

Gutmans served on the board of the Eclipse Foundation ^[6] (October 2005 - October 2008),^[7][8] is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation,^[9] and was nominated for the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software^[10] in 1999.

In 2004 he wrote a book called "PHP 5 Power Programming" ^[11] together with Stig Bakken and Derick Rethans.

Gutmans was recognized by ComputerWorld magazine in July 2007 ^[12][13] in their article “40 Under 40: 40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40.” ^[14]

In March 2016, Gutmans left Rogue Wave^[15] to join Amazon Web Services.^[16] Explaining his motivations, Gutmans cited "Cloud infrastructure adoption is at a tipping point" and "the data 'center of gravity' is moving to the cloud", where Amazon "appears to effectively balance innovation and invention: a focus on customer value with a bias to action".^[17] In his role at Amazon Web Services, Gutmans managed Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Redshift, Amazon CloudSearch, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Neptune.

In May 2020, Gutmans joined Google as VP Engineering, Databases.^[18]

Gutmans holds four citizenships: Swiss, British, Israeli and American.^[1]