Ruby-on-Rails startup FiveRuns has been acquired by WorkThink, according to FiveRuns’ site. FiveRuns provides a variety of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails and related open source and commercial systems. Built on Rails and delivered as a hosted service, FiveRuns’ products manage the complete Rails application lifecycle — from installation to production.
Products include Install, a free Ruby on Rails stack powered by BitRock; Manage, which was an application that monitors your Rails applications in production (Manage was discontinued this summer); TuneUp (a debugging tool which we wrote about here); and Dash, which was a metrics, storage, reporting, and communication hub for applications connected to the web. According to FiveRuns, Dash’s services will be discontinued by the middle of October. It’s unclear if the other products will survive the transition.
FiveRuns has raised $9 million total from Austin Ventures and is in the same genre of startups such as New Relic, Heroku, and Engine Yard. It appears that Workthink hasn’t launched yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
so, a company no one knows just bought a company that no one knows. awesome!
so, some guy no one knows just commented a comment that no one should know about.
It’s unclear if the other products will survive the transition.
Manage was already shut down. The online part of the TuneUp service was also already shut down.
From what I recall, FiveRuns’ blog was almost dead for the past year (except to announce the termination of most of their products) and I’ve had no contact from them in at least a year (they used to contact me frequently, I run the biggest Ruby news blog). I’m not sure what sort of acquisition this is really.
Wow. I’d hate to be a developer relying on those services…
Yeah, their warnings weren’t that far in advance, but competitor New Relic stepped in pretty quickly with an offer, and some of the hosting companies offering FiveRuns Manage have moved to New Relic quite quickly too. Not sure how historic data fared in that move though..
Seems like workthink has nothing to do with FiveRuns products.
Not sure how historic data fared in that move though..
We (Scout) worked with FiveRuns to help transition Manage customers to Scout for server monitoring and Ruby on Rails monitoring. We didn’t import historical data (not enough time) but suggested a recommenced setup.
Any details on the sale price and company size?
Yes, I’d like to see more details like this also. TC?
I suspect this is more of a VC spin-in than a true acquisition of any importance. Would be willing to bet $5 that Workthink is an AV affiliated company when it emerges from behind its shroud.
My online education company used FiveRuns for a short while and it was terrible. We quickly moved to NewRelic which has been great value for money and much better in every aspect. My guess is that FiveRuns was bought for pennies on the dollar.
Cheers,
Graham
Leena Rao write: the same genre of startups such as New Relic, Heroku, and Engine Yard.
Actually there is no comparison between FiveRuns/New Relic with Heroku/Engine Yard. The genres couldn’t be more different. This is a pretty major error that calls into question any tech insight.
Well, they are all targeting the Ruby on Rails eco-system which puts them in the same genre IMHO. Of course the offerings are totally different between the companies, but they all depend on the size of the Ruby on Rails community. I am a big Rails supporter and it is a pity to see a company which was a key commercial contributor to the ecosystem go away.
It does make you wonder a little about whether the Rails community is large enough to support venture funded business models like New Relic, Heroku and Engine Yard. Hopefully Rails adoption will continue to increase fast enough to satisfy their revenue plans.