Comment 94 for bug 1522422

Jens G. said:
"there are a great many procucts out there, that don't have PHP7 compatibility right now (and don't plan to in the near future). Even worse when throwing in products like ZendGuard (*shiver*) into the mix, that don't support PHP7 yet (ergo all encrypted stuff from them won't work on PHP7/xenial for some time to come)."

You say many products..... and do not mention anything else than ZendGuard...

I always had problems with ZendGuard not supporting php releases, (or supporting them 2 years after the release is integrated in a ubuntu LTS release cf trusty...).
I also had problems with their "perpetual licence" that is not so perpetual...

So I wrote a php obfuscator for myself, that I made freely available under MIT license at https://github.com/pk-fr/yakpro-po
Perhaps you could consider using it....

php7 is a must!