Somehow I missed this interview carried out in the beginning of the year. The interesting part for me was this:

What about PHP 6?

We are thinking about it. Again, we don't all agree on what direction that should take. My personal view on what I'd like to try, though I have no idea if it will work, is to go for Parrot. Parrot is the really cool new engine behind Perl 6. But it is not tied that closely to Perl.

Would Parrot replace Zend or would they work together?

It would basically replace it. Just like Zend replaced my engine a couple of years ago. We'd go for the best engine along the way. There would be plenty of other Zend code that would still be in there. But those are some of the arguments we are having in the project right now. Which direction do we take with this? Is this really a better engine? And things like that. Until we have some code running and look at performance, at CPU and memory usage, and at how easy the API is to use, only then we can take a decision.

How would this affect Zend the company? I don't think anyone really knows at this stage. This could allow Zend to target a larger market, but it would obsolete quite a number of their existing products.