Global IT training company NIIT and California-based Zend Technologies today announced a partnership to develop a skilled workforce within the country on hypertext preprocessor (PHP) web technology.

"There is huge gap in demand and supply of PHP programmers. At present, there are only 6,000 certified PHP programmers across the world. We want to take this number to 80,000 in the next three years," NIIT Chief Executive Officer Vijay K Thadani said while announcing the partnership.

PHP is a computing language for building web-based applications. It is an open source software on which 35 per cent of the world's web sites, including Facebook, Yahoo and the New York Stocks Exchange portal, are based, Zend claimed.

"The adoption of PHP has grown in enterprises. This partnership with NIIT is very important for us. System integrators in the US, Europe and India are being increasingly asked by clients now to build more PHP applications then Java-based applications," Zend Technologies Vice-President, Americas and Emerging Markets Field Operations, Siddhartha Agarwal said.

The PHP language was co-authored by Zend, Agarwal said.

"This is first global alliance of Zend with a training company to create Zend-certified programmers. We will start PHP courses from 50 centres and extend it to 200 centres in the next three years," NITT President, Individual Learning Solutions, G Raghavan said.

NIIT expects to churn out 12,000 students this year under the new initiative. The PHP course for a beginner will be of eight months' duration and the course fee will be in the range of Rs 50,000 per student.

"The demand for PHP programmers is huge. If you search for jobs on Naukri.com, which itself is on a PHP platform, you will find approximately 10,000 vacancies for PHP programmers.

One of our goals is also to develop PHP trainers to take training abroad," Thadani said.

Thadani added that with demand for smartphones growing, more people will have access to the Internet and they will need content.

"In future, we see that access to the Internet and demand for web-based application is going to explode demand for PHP," Thadani said.

As part of this tie-up, Zend will provide the PHP curriculum, the framework for training and impart training to trainers on Zend Softwares. Based on these inputs, NIIT will customise content for absorption within the Indian market.