RailsFactory: Ruby on Rails Solutions; Champions of the Trade
A self learnt programmer, Senthil Nayagam started his experiments with the internet in 1997. Having never worker for a larger organization, Senthil loved to work his own way and exposed himself to a lot of development and research. Starting out in 2006 as a two member company along with friend Dinesh in a 600 sq. ft. apartment, Railsfactory has now grown to over 150 members, 2 offices and a total of 20,000 sq. ft. furnished office space.“The team is a wonderful mix for web application development with the best combination of RoR, PHP, Python and Mobile developers, supported by a good team of Server Admin and Management Teams as well,” says Senthil. His interest in technology and desire to build applications that last were a motivation to move forward and the projects they’ve undertaken has given the team immense confidence. Some of their marquee projects would include:
- APIGEE- A client for whom Railsfactory build Enterprise application for API lifecycle management
- AMP- Built an Asset Management Software for them
- The Hype- Project for Product Analysis and Social Sharing
There are plenty of reasons why Ruby On Rails has seen a meteoric rise in recent times. “Before 2004 there were java, .net, php, python and some other frameworks for developing web applications; they had limitations depending on a specific platform or IDE, or limited to working with specific databases. RoR helps build richer web applications effortlessly; RoR has been a pioneer in many senses like non GPL licensing, a ruby framework solving 80% of common usecases, being database agnostic, first major project to go on board github on a distributed development model, a framework to support AJAX, database migrations, remote deployment, restful API's and much more!” says Senthil and you can’t miss the enthusiasm.
Outsourced product development, consulting and support services the main revenue streams. “We have had a solid growth rate of 100% over the year and are moving strong YoY. We market and deliver services and products and have a solid portfolio to market. We adjust to the market trends and tap the market to gain mileage.” informs Senthil.
Having been in the field for more than half a decade, Senthil has been witness to changes that have taken place and Railsfactory has adapted to them smoothly. The company is placed in a precarious condition wherein it is no longer a startup in the actual sense but is by no means a “big” company too, mainly because of the way in which they work. “The current challenge that we face is more oriented towards our projection to our clients. The manner in which we project our products and services, the revenue model across geographies, client specific modeling of project methodologies are currently few of the challenges that we see. This, I strongly feel is a conflict between ‘Small Big Company’ and ‘Big Small Company’ crisis which we are going through,” says Senthil. But this is nowhere close to the kind of challenges they faced while starting up.
Chennai wasn’t very startup friendly back then but the situation is changing now. And to auger this movement, RailsFactory also has an initiative called StartupFactory which is helping Chennai startups with mentoring and providing them infrastructure to get started.
Having set up a strong foundation, the company’s growth is strongly supported by its employees and the resource pool of Railsfactory play a major role in its success. They’ve expanded and have built more wings for development. “We have created a few brands and subsidiaries which focus on specific problems and industries; one company is building SAAS applications for the Indian market, another on Mobile application development, and one on Big Data and Scaling. We expect them to grow even faster and expect to cross a USD 100m valuation by 2015,” signs off Senthil, on an optimistic note.
More on their website.
