Sazbean

Software Development Management

Main navigation

You are here: Home / Archives for News & Notes

News & Notes

/

Interview with Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard

I have mentioned before that hosting Rails applications is one of those great opportunities to avail yourself of assistance. The guys behind Engine Yard saw their chance to help the community and build out a solid foundation for a business. I had a chance to talk with Lance Walley, CEO of the San Francisco based hosting company about Ruby, Rails and their business model.

Sazbean: What problem is Engine Yard solving?
Lance: We make deployment and scaling of Ruby on Rails applications easy and largely hands-off. Our customers pay for great infrastructure and excellent people running it, all focused on Rails apps. In the end, they see us as inexpensive payroll on top of great hosting infrastructure. Some of the basic technologies (Ruby and Rails) can be improved or augmented our support of Rubinius and Merb are helping both move forward and grow to answer customer needs. We are hosting + expertise + software development to make Ruby and Rails better for all!

Sazbean: So how can EY help the average B2B company?
Lance: B2B companies will certainly want to develop web apps to support internal needs and external needs (customers). Ruby on Rails is great for fast development of those apps. Engine Yard is great for no-thinking, just-get-it-done-without-me deployment and management of those apps once they’re developed.

Sazbean: Obie Fernandez wrote in a January 2008 article that there was a waiting list for new customers. Is this still true?
Lacnce: We massively built up our support organization, which includes sys admins, Rails experts, and database admins. That solved the waiting list issue. We now have a queue of about 5 days, mostly because customers take time getting info to our guys that our guys need to deploy customers’ apps.

Sazbean: Does EY consider itself a silicon valley startup?
Lance: We’re a Sacramento / San Francisco startup. We modeled this business to be profitable and not need VC [Venture Capital ~ed]. We later took VC to pursue areas that represent a huge opportunity, and which we could not pursue quickly without VC and we’re about 2 years old and didn’t take VC until we were 1.5 years old so I’m not sure if that all adds up to traditional valley startup.

Sazbean: Unlike startups with a software product, hosting solutions like EY have a large barrier to entry. You need hardware, you need specialized skills and you need capital. So, why hosting?
Lance: It was a natural outgrowth of a previous business. We have an older company that does consulting; we saw that clients didn’t want to do this stuff, but they wanted really good solutions run by top-notch people. We created Engine Yard. while it did take some capital up front, we knew from the experience of others that it’s a quick cash generator vs. some other businesses. We literally saw it as a pretty quick path to cash generation and profitability. We’re now doing a lot of stuff that goes beyond that original idea, but we always saw hosting as a good business in which to start in a new market like Rails.

Sazbean: Many B2B companies are untrusting of startups and of new ventures. It means something that you are profitable and stable and up front about it.

Lance: Yeah, we experienced some of that back when we started in 2006. People had to get to trust us and our financial footing also helps when they know that we founders are all small business guys in the past… never huge companies, but real, profitable, decade or more companies each Now, of course, with pretty big VCs involved, that’s also a good thing, but I suppose VC makes some people suspicious, too. We have still kept our basic business philosophies of running a tight ship, not burning cash without need, etc.

Sazbean: You mentioned your people a few times tonight. Do you consider your people the distinguishing part of the equation?
Lance: There are 3 distinguishing parts.

  1. The infrastructure we designed is extremely solid, very redundant, etc. We’ve been at it for 2 years and the architects are incredible people. Customers are buying that.
  2. The staff that supports our customers directly is top-notch. There are between 35-40 people in Support now, spread from CA to NY to UK to Australia. Customers are paying for the ability to get help and wisdom from this staff 24/7. As well as stuff like database tuning, etc. The people component is very important to customers.
  3. We have some of the best people working on those open-source projects that promise to improve Ruby and Rails for everyone. Our customers are indirectly buying into those people, too. There is a general feeling by customers that they get all this expertise for a relatively low price in terms of human costs.

Sazbean: Any well known Rails websites using EY that you can disclose?
Lance: Sure If you check out http://rails100.pbwiki.com/ we are literally involved thru Engine Yard or Quality Humans, Inc with 33-50% of those sites. Hulu (#3) for instance is NBC + Fox we helped them build that site back in 2006 or 2007. Seeking Alpha is a cool financial info site, they provide data to Yahoo Finance. Kongregate was a VERY early EY customer. I think they just took an investment from Jeff Bezos, who does not invest lightly.

Sazbean: Impressive.

Lance: It’s not yahoo or google, but they’re coming.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

CrunchBase Information
Engine Yard
Information provided by CrunchBase

/

Ruby on Rails: Four misconceptions and a truth

Ruby on Rails

Business type people, cover your eyes for a sec. This one is for the web developers. Ok, so if you have not yet seen the Ruby on Rails screencast then the next fifteen minutes may change a few perceptions regarding web development. Take a look. Go on, I’ll wait. That little video has done more to poke the fire of web controversy than any debate since the IE v Netscape browser wars. It made big waves with people looking for alternatives from Microsoft and Sun. From the other side of the yard, php and perl programmers were impressed by the full service nature of the framework. Testing, DB connectivity, MVC, AJAX, even web services were all rolled into the system in the beginning, not bolted on afterward. It hit a sweet spot in the community at just the right time.

The business world (thats you guys with your eyes closed) appreciated the quick application turnaround and the low low price. Suddenly simple applications could be modeled in hours and up and running in a day. The quality of those early apps were rough, but the quick turnaround gave the stakeholders something tangible to see and experience. I have used Rails in many applications in my day job and I have reaped the benefits both as a department head and as a programmer. We have been trusting Ruby on Rails more and more for critical applications both internally and out in the wild.

Here are some misconceptions about Rails

  1. Ruby is too new to trust your applications to: Ruby is not a new language. Ruby is almost old as Perl, having started in Japan over 10 years ago. This means it is a well tested, fully proven language to develop in. The Rails hoopla has allowed for many authors to fully explore ruby and rails in book after book. The language is a very safe bet at the moment, possibly a better reputation at the moment than Java at least in the web community.
  2. Hosting rails applications is impossible: I will say that hosting rails is tricky, but no more so than PHP, Python, Perl or Java. The hardest part is overcoming the knowledge gap between what is assumed by instruction writers and what you truly understand. That just takes a bit of time, a good book, or a good consultant. Since its true that difficulty breeds opportunity, the safest solution is to host with a pro. I will be interviewing the CEO of EngineYard in an up-coming segment.
  3. Rails wont Scale: If someone tells you not to use Rails because you cannot scale up the site to large number of users, thank them for their assistance and walk away from the conversation. It’s a troll bait argument which has no defendable position either for or against. Sure, there are large apps that run rails. There are also large apps that run rails and have success issues. The real kernel of the argument is ‘Do you know enough to make a certifiably scalable application in language X instead?’ If not, then just don’t worry about it. For the non expert, rails has just as many pit falls as php, java, perl, python, asp, .net, etc. With the exception of Microsoft, Rails tries just about the hardest to avoid those pitfalls for new users. Arguments can be made that they succeed more often than Redmond, too. So if your site’s traffic is modest at best, don’t let scaling scare ya. When your site gets huge, you can still keep your site in ruby.
  4. The Rails community has a Our Way is the Only Way attitude: Yep, can’t really argue with this one. The leadership of the Ruby on Rails group is tight knit and self facing. They are solving problems that they see in ways that they believe is best. Nothing wrong with this and actually it is a perfect model for highly focused software design. One of the traps of programming languages and applications is the human tendency to compromise. Compromise leads to more than one way to achieve a goal, which always leads to complexity, confusion and non conformity in implementation. Rails skirts this issue by just saying ‘Do it our way’. This isn’t a problem for 99.9% of the web community so it really is overplayed in the media. If you want Rails to do something it doesn’t do, you are free to fork the source code and make your own version.

/

Web 2.0 Expo – Personal Analytics

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s – the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

Technorati Tags: , ,