ELC Technologies Launches New European Operations With Two Ruby on Rails Development Customers

October 5, 2007; 04:04 AM
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo this week, ELC Technologies, the consulting firm specializing in creating commercial and enterprise applications for global companies using Ruby on Rails, announced that they have kicked off their new European consulting operations by signing two new clients: Mediastores (www.mediastores.com) of the United Kingdom and ResponderBoy.com of Germany.

ELC Technologies has assembled the largest team of dedicated Ruby on Rails developers, and has been developing commercial and enterprise applications for global companies such as Cisco Systems, LiveNation, Buy.com, and MediaTrust. Jonathan Siegel, founder of ELC and newly appointed Vice President Sales and President, United Kingdom, plans to bring the same Ruby on Rails and agile software development expertise to the European market. ELC has just launched its European operations with offices in London and Dublin, and these two companies are the first clients for ELC Europe.

Founded in 2006, Mediastores is a start-up company that allows anyone to build their own online books, DVD and CD store for free and earn 20% commission. With the aid of ELC Technologies, Mediastores has undergone a transformation, using Ruby on Rails to shorten development time and create a new site capable of handling a much higher volume of transaction traffic. With help from ELC’s Rails development team, MediaStores was able to upgrade its online operations to handle multinational e-commerce, improve enterprise integration for fulfillment, and generally upgrade the site to handle more transaction faster and more smoothly than ever. The new Mediastores site is expected to make its debut in time for the Christmas selling season with five major UK charities, and will soon migrate to the United States.

"Working with ELC has been a pleasure,” said Mike Jackson, Managing Director, Mediastores. “Every deadline has been met and both Ruby-on-Rails and Agile Development have transformed the speed at which we were able to bring our service to market.”

Similarly, ResponderBoy.com is targeting the German e-commerce market to help online retailers better manage online transactions. ResponderBoy.com provides a wide range of e-tail services, such as shopping carts, safe transactions, order management, and more as a seamless integrated extension of their customers’ online stores. ELC Technologies is using Ruby on Rails to build an electronic mail list management system that will increase ROI for e-business customers by leveraging repeat customers and e-mail prospects.

“By working with leading companies in North America, we have been able to prove that combining Ruby on Rails with agile software development practices can shorten time to deployment for robust enterprise applications,” said Siegel. “We see Europe as the next market to embrace Rails for commercial applications. European companies are more open to using open source to extend their enterprise networks, and innovators such as the BBC, financial institutions, and telecoms are already deploying Rails applications. As the largest Rails development consultancy, we see Europe as a booming market, which is why we are aggressively expanding our European presence.”

Siegel recently addressed attendees at the RailsConf Europe conference, sharing his experience in applying Ruby on Rails for commercial applications and demystifying the trade-offs with using Rails as opposed to Java and .NET for development. As the ELC team has discovered, using agile software development techniques with Rails can take up to one-third to one-fifth the time required for a .NET or Java development initiative. The ELC Technologies team has become acknowledged experts at mitigating risk in Ruby on Rails deployments, and developing enterprise-class applications that can scale to handle millions of transactions per day.

About ELC Technologies

Founded in 1991, ELC Technologies (www.elctech.com) is powering the hottest Ruby on Rails web applications. From Cisco to TuneCore to Live Nation, ELC Technologies is bringing Ruby on Rails to business-critical applications. The company’s team has years of technical experience and more than 50 years of team Rails experience. The company has assembled developers who are Rails Studio Alumni, Scale with Rails Alumni, Advanced Rails Studio Alumni, Enterprise Rails Studio Alumni. ELC Technology is also a RailsConf Sponsor in the U.S. and Europe. The company has one of the largest and most experienced Ruby on Rails teams, tuned in to the latest web technologies and aesthetics, with a broad palette of agile practices to help client projects succeed. ELC Technologies has its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, and international offices in London, England and Dublin, Ireland.