I'm not a web developer, but that sounds pretty sane to me. However, the important part of their decision, I'm guessing, was not so much the PHP part, but the "

I'm not a web developer, but that sounds pretty sane to me. However, the important part of their decision, I'm guessing, was not so much the PHP part, but the "get people who actually know about the web to do this for us." Someone has to build the site either way, and I'm guessing the embedded engineers they had working on it didn't really know how to go about that. EDIT: Another possibility is that they already had PHP devs working on their corporate site or whatever, and they wanted to use them instead of hiring another team.