Rails Monitoring and Development Focus Fuels Product, Customer, and Partner Growth

FiveRuns, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails and other popular open source and commercial systems, announced today it has secured $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The funding will be used to continue FiveRuns’ rapid growth in the Ruby on Rails community by accelerating product development, sales and marketing, and the company’s partnership efforts.

Since its launch in August 2006, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding, successfully released the industry’s first products for Ruby on Rails monitoring, grown its customer base to over 65 organizations monitoring hundreds of servers, added six reseller and marketing partners, and enabled thousands of downloads of integrated Rails environments around the world. With its innovative monitoring, development and production products, FiveRuns is helping Ruby on Rails developers, administrators and service providers to build, run, and monitor better performing applications.

In conjunction with this most recent round of funding, FiveRuns has added three new members to its executive team that bring significant experience to the company. Olivier Thierry, president and CEO of FiveRuns, comes from an extensive software career, most notably with Mission Critical Software and NetIQ, where he was the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing & Alliances. Dean Cruse, vice president of marketing, has more than 23 years experience in software marketing, most recently with PerformanceRetail, and Steve Sanderson, most recently with Sapling Systems, brings more than 24 years of experience as FiveRuns’ new vice president of development and technology. These new executives complement the company’s growing team of Ruby on Rails professionals to broaden he company’s reach in the rapidly growing Rails market.

“All of the industry signposts are pointing to Rails becoming a significant framework for web application development. FiveRuns is squarely positioned to augment this wave by delivering products in support of its growth,” said Olivier Thierry, president and CEO of FiveRuns. “With our new funding, the growth of our customer base, and the ongoing innovation coming from our team, we continue to support the Rails community as the adoption accelerates.”

Ruby on Rails, a web application framework for the Ruby programming language, has been quickly gaining popularity because it improves both the speed of web application development and the user experience. In May 2007, FiveRuns unveiled its Management Suite for Rails, the first, and currently the only, solution to manage the full Rails application lifecycle, from automating the setup and maintenance of an integrated Rails development environment to ensuring Rails applications perform well in production. To date, FiveRuns has secured more than 65 customers and six marketing and reseller partners who are using the FiveRuns products to monitor their applications for improved performance. In addition, hundreds of companies are currently evaluating the software, and there have been more than 1,000 downloads of RM-Install, a free application created by FiveRuns and Bitrock to ease initial deployments of Rails.

FiveRuns’ Rails Application Management Partner (RAMP) program, also launched in May, has attracted hosting companies, value-added resellers and other Rails service providers, who also recognize the opportunity that Rails presents. Since May, six companies have signed on to be RAMP partners, and offer or recommend FiveRuns’ products to their customers. One of the partners announced today, Atlantic Dominion Solutions (www.techcfl.com), is a premier web development firm that specializes in using Ruby on Rails to build advanced, scalable, database-backed applications for organizations of all sizes. “We are excited to be working with FiveRuns to integrate their Rails monitoring products into the applications we are building for our customers,” said Robert Dempsey, project director at ADS. “FiveRuns is a perfect complement to our focus on building applications that solve real business problems and give our customers an edge.”