Rails Web Host Engine Yard Now $3.5 Million Richer!
(photo credit: The Consumerist - CC Attribution 2.0)
Prominent Rails Web hosting company Engine Yard have raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, a particularly successful venture capital firm who backed AOL and eBay in the early days. Money is afloweth into the Ruby and Rails sector!
The best write up of this news is by Obie Fernandez over at InfoQ. He talks about Engine Yard's operation, their hiring of Rubinius developers, and Engine Yard's thoughts for the future. Interestingly:
In discussing the benefits of taking VC money at this time, Engine Yard CEO Lance emphasized the fact that unlike hosting, Rubinius development is a longer-term play, which along with Merb may eventually become part of a commercially-available technology stack.
Nice work, Engine Yard. The drinks are on you!
January 11, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Super cool. Congrats to Engine Yard.
January 11, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Definitely trying to divert longterm business from the JRuby and Rails markets. We welcome our new Rubinius/Merb enterprise consulting overlords.
January 12, 2008 at 3:38 am
This is good news as my slice will be available next week!
January 12, 2008 at 3:44 am
Gen Du: What do you mean "divert business from the JRuby and Rails markets"? Specifically, what JRuby market are you talking about?
January 12, 2008 at 3:47 am
Judging from what he/she said in the mod_ruby thread, I think Gen Du is just playing devil's advocate (not that that's a bad thing). I guess he/she is making the point that if money is being thrown after a company potentially pursuing a commercial Rubinius/Merb stack, that could eat into JRuby adoption.. but then the same is true of work on any alternative implementations.
January 12, 2008 at 5:14 am
It's the JBoss model. Gee... what other companies has Benchmark won big with?
There's no JRuby "market" as you well know. If Sun is pursuing a JRuby consulting market they're doing it all wrong. EY on the other hand is making a very calculated move to tie the future of Ruby to their products so they can rent you their $400 p/h Ruby architects (not kidding).
Hey, well, it's better than the old Enterprise. But I'm not convinced the best interests of Ruby are their first priority.