Engine Yard, the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS), has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Orchestra, bringing deep PHP expertise to the Engine Yard platform.

Engine Yard has established itself as the best Platform as a Service for Ruby on Rails applications. The company supports thousands of customers, ranging from fast-growing Web 2.0 start-ups to Fortune 500 enterprises, which are located in 45 countries, and consume 35 million CPU hours quarterly.

“The Engine Yard PaaS is the leading choice for development teams that need to build highly reliable, scalable Ruby on Rails applications because we deliver deep expertise, a curated stack, and expert support services,” said John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard. “Engine Yard has powered some of the fastest growing businesses in history. With Orchestra and its team of dedicated PHP contributors joining Engine Yard, we’re extending our platform into an adjacent market to help PHP developers achieve the same success.”

Engine Yard will accelerate development of the Orchestra PHP platform by increasing investment and leveraging the experience, expertise and leadership, which have fueled the company’s rapid growth over the past five years. PHP and Ruby on Rails developers alike will benefit from access to world-class orchestration, support, service and training.

“As passionate and long-time members of the PHP community, we created Orchestra to offer a better experience to PHP developers by reducing the time, costs and risks of setting up and scaling reliable PHP applications,” said Eamon Leonard, CEO of Orchestra. “By joining Engine Yard, we will accelerate our delivery of this vision and provide developers with exceptional support, services and technology.”

The Orchestra team includes highly active PHP contributors. Some of the key projects that Orchestra has supported include PEAR and PEAR2 (library repository), including the PEAR installer and its successor Pyrus (The PHP component manager), FRAPI (a high-level API framework), CakePHP (a rapid development framework for PHP), Lithium (lightweight, fast, flexible framework for PHP 5.3), SPL (Standard PHP Library) and more. This commitment to the community is consistent with the Engine Yard tradition of leadership and participation in key open source initiatives. Following the acquisition, Engine Yard will continue to make substantial investment in both Ruby on Rails and PHP open source communities and projects.

For additional information, please visit: http://www.engineyard.com/orchestra.