Ruby is shining for Thoughtworks

PUNE: ThoughtWorks Inc., an IT consultancy and provider of application development, systems integration and organizational transformation services has been witnessing significant revenue contributions from Ruby lately and is upbeat on sustaining the trend further.

From a negligible percentage last year, the business from Ruby has gone up to 35 per cent this year and the company expects it to touch 50 per cent in 2008.

Roy Singham, founder and chairperson, ThoughtWorks says that with Sun’s endorsement of JRuby, the landscape is changing faster.

“We have two leading investment banks, who have made substantial investments in Ruby. Among other uptick trends like PHP, Python and Java script, Ruby is certainly a bright spot. It is a dynamic language that allows for domain specific approach to creating software. We have seen Ruby gain action in Australia, Canada, UK etc in the last four months.”

The company currently has 250 Ruby trained developers. He however adds that Java will stay as revenue major for the next three years while potential languages like Groovy and Python (especially in Europe) will be important too.

Earlier, in an interview with CyberMedia News, Singham had said, “Ruby will challenge Java in the next five years. However, as of today, there's so much money already spent on Java that hesitance is understandable. At the same time ecosystem is a problem for Ruby and my objective is to ensure that this hitch is ironed out. While Ruby is what most people ask for, we are pushing RoR (Ruby On Rails). Development of Ruby enterprise tools is the move next.”

The company is also mulling a third development center in Chennai with an initial seating capacity of 50 people. It is expected to kick off by October. It currently has presence in Bangalore and Pune, which too will be ramped up from 50 to 300 people by this year’s end.

Earlier, the company had announced that it is working on a next generation commercial testing product aimed at developers and quality analysts. The same, he added, has been developed exclusively in India and is touted to offer very advanced way of approaching test cases. Singham tags it as the most complicated R&D work that will be available as a packaged product in January 2008. This will be its next pore-product foray after the mint-new Mingle, the first software application by ThoughtWorks Studios.

Singham adds that while work of similar nature is not something new to the company, the SaaS (Software as a Service) model would be a new change. “The next upgrade will be to cruise control in virtualization space as well as additional features on Rubyworks.”