Engine Yard, Inc.

Five Questions with Steve Kickert of Riverock Technologies.

Tell us more about OnePlace®.

OnePlace is online team collaboration and project management software with a simple mission: to help you and your team achieve. All three parts of the solution—team collaboration, project management and personal productivity—have been designed to work together elegantly in one simple yet full-featured app. We offer OnePlace as an on-demand solution hosted at Engine Yard, with subscriptions that range from a free personal version, to team versions priced between $25-$500 per month. Users can access OnePlace via any modern web browser, as well as the iPhone and other web-enabled mobile devices. This gives users the ability to modify and share data anywhere, anytime.

How did you come to use Ruby on Rails for OnePlace?

Our development team is experienced, having worked mostly at enterprise software companies. Our backgrounds span .NET and Java, but not open source per se. We had heard a lot about Rails, and after a detailed research study, decided it provided a definite advantage over other technologies with regards to building data-intensive web applications. The more we worked with Rails, the more we fell it love with it, especially its “convention over configuration” philosophy. Using Rails has been a wonderful experience, and we haven’t looked back since.

When did Engine Yard come into the picture?

I read a lot of blogs and listen to a lot of podcasts. I found an interview with Ezra Zygmuntowicz (co-founder of Engine Yard) online and quickly learned that they were really plugged into the Rails community. Our local Ruby and Rails user group also mentioned Engine Yard frequently, and referred us to you. We needed an operations partner, not just a hosting partner—we could have gone a lot of places for just hosting. After speaking with Engine Yard we realized that the company would provide more than hardware. They’ve become our operations team with hosting thrown in, which is how Engine Yard’s Founder and CTO Tom Mornini explained the company’s approach to business.

How has your experience with Engine Yard been so far?

Not only is Engine Yard extremely knowledgeable about my business, but also knowing that I don’t have to staff that side of my business is a huge burden lifted off my shoulders. Engine Yard has my back. We are a small Web 2.0 company with limited resources. I want my staff focused 100 percent on development, not operations or system administration. I would have had to hire two to three people to handle IT operations without Engine Yard. I have no interest in staffing this internally right now and running my own server. Working with Engine Yard, I’m also confident that things will be done quickly and in a professional way. Any time, any day I can pick up the phone and talk to someone. This is a huge benefit. I can even call them several times a day if I need to. I’m not tied to only four calls per month, which is what I had with Microsoft several years ago.

Any advice you can give to companies considering Ruby or Rails?

Just do it. In all seriousness, this is the best way to start. If you can, do a pilot project. We jumped in with both feet because we could. There is a very active Rails community on the web and in most large cities. So, you should not have any trouble finding resources to help you. I have talked to a number of companies that are very happy with the productivity of their development teams now that they are using Rails.