Today has proved to be much busier than expected, but there were a few interesting articles worth exploring:
- First, 63 percent of IT departments surveyed by Forrester "expect[] social technologies to impact the business world." The other 37 percent apparently don't realize just how much time their employees are wasting each day on MySpace. :-)
- Ruby on Rails hosting and optimization company Engine Yard just nabbed a $15 million Series B round of financing from NEA, Amazon.com, and Benchmark. This makes a total of $18.5 million raised so far.
- Finally, Apple sold over 1 million 3G iPhones in the first weekend alone, which is impressive given how hard they were to get for many of us. This is particularly interesting given that the overall handset market is contracting. Apple is swimming against the tide, as great products and companies do in difficult times.
TechCrunch is claiming that Twitter, that service that lets Twits tweet, is dumping Ruby on Rails after two years due to scalability problems. Twitter has responded by declaring its just as much a fan of Ruby on Rails as ever, and instead is limiting "tweets" to 139 characters (instead of the standard 140) because 140 is "taxing the system."
That one extra character must be one heck of a straw to break the Twitter back. (By the way, it seems like a rather odd way to deal with the problem. Imagine if email providers Microsoft or Zimbra boosted performance by requiring one less word per message...?)
I've heard the scalability and performance claims before against Ruby on Rails, but I've also talked with companies like Engine Yard who insist that Ruby on Rails is not inherently unscalable - it just needs a practiced hand to make it scale. Indeed, Benchmark's investment in Engine Yard was fed primarily by a desire to make Ruby on Rails more scalable.
Twitter may or may not be dumping Ruby on Rails. Who cares? There is enough investment going into Rails that any short-term deficiencies in the technology are just that: short-term.
Oddly enough, the answer to that question ("What's really going on with JBoss?") is probably best answered by someone outside Red Hat: Marc Fleury. Marc isn't shackled by the need to keep corporate secrets, though perhaps he's a little biased.
Marc offers several data points that suggest that JBoss adoption and monetization is "going through the roof." But he also takes on two potential aspirants to the JBoss throne: Ruby on Rails and SpringSource (I've sanitized Marc's comments to suit my Puritan sensibilities):
... Read moreLast week, Benchmark announced a $3.5 million investment in Engine Yard, which provides commercial support for Ruby on Rails applications. Engine Yard is doing $3 million in business and growing. It's also profitable. It didn't need the investment.
The investment, however, is very telling. When one of the top venture capital firms on the planet puts hard dollars behind a support model, it's significant. It becomes doubly so when the firm (or its investors) in question previously invested in JBoss, MySQL, SpringSource (Interface21), and other support-based open-source companies.
It may mean that Benchmark knows something that the rest of the industry seems determined to ignore: services-based businesses may well be the future of the software industry.
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