Today we kickoff another weekly feature that we’re calling Q&A Wednesday. We start off with a Q&A with Dean Cruse, VP of Sales and Marketing at FiveRuns. Five Runs provides enterprise management for people developing in Ruby on Rails. The company is doing some tremendous things for the Ruby on Rails community.
Q: Even non-technical people are starting to hear more about Ruby on Rails. Why is it important to offer enterprise class management services to people interested in developing in Rails?
Rails is definitely hot. It’s easy to use and developers can be significantly more productive with it compared to other frameworks. And, while a lot of today’s more visible sites are built on Rails, more and more businesses are looking to adopt it for their applications as well. These organizations are looking for management tools to help them profile and tune their applications before taking them to production, and for ways to manage Rails applications once they’re live. Rails by itself doesn’t provide any way to instrument performance or manage applications – that’s where FiveRuns steps in with our application monitoring and management tools – we help take the risk out of developing, installing, and managing Rails applications. And, the community is eating it up.
Q: Tell us how FiveRuns got started, and how the venture financing came about?
FiveRuns was founded in 2005 and funded by Austin Ventures and Silverton Partners. Initially, the company focused on building a new breed of systems management software for small to medium sized businesses who were looking for lighter-weight, easier to use tools than what they could find from traditional vendors. We built the FiveRuns software on Ruby on Rails, and along the way discovered the need to provide management tools for the Rails framework. We brought in a fantastic team of Rails experts, systems management professionals and Internet software folks, and launched FiveRuns as the Rails Management Company last May at RailsConf. The response has been terrific.
Q: Many startups create advisory boards and hope to benefit from them. You’ve created an incredible Rails brain trust! What value has that brought to the company and your customers?
With any new development framework, it’s important to solicit the feedback of the community early on and make sure what you’re developing will hit the mark. This has been particularly true with Rails – it’s a close knit community with a very clear, opinionated view on how to do web development. We reached out to many of the Ruby on Rails thought leaders to ask for their feedback and much of that has gone into our product and future development plans. From the response we’ve seen so far, the community is definitely looking for solutions like FiveRuns is building. Our advisory board adds a level of trust from the community that eases any new technology concerns that customers might have.
Q: What milestones or key moments have you had when you all said to yourselves, “We’ve really got something here!”?
Probably a few things – when we were able to attract the best of the Rails community as advisors and team members, it was clear we had something unique and valuable. That led to signing customers that are leading the way with Rails – from innovators like 37 Signals to hosting providers like Blue Box Group. This was also evident from the standing-room-only attendance we had at RailsConf when we launched RM-Manage, our rails application monitoring product. It was incredible to see the overwhelming interest from individual engineers, to web development shops, to large organizations, all clamoring for new ways to manage their Rails applications.
Q: What can we look forward to in the future from FiveRuns?
We’re committed to the Rails market and are true believers in its future. We’ll continue to innovate around Rails management and introduce new products like our new, free Rails stack, RM-Install, that makes it easier to get productive on Rails. We’re always looking for ways to give back to the Rails community, and by developing innovative solutions that make it easier to rollout and manage Rails applications, we hope to further its adoption and help our customers ride this exciting wave.
