VMware looking to Ruby?

I have been following many different trends in Cloud as of late, including:

• Virtualization (VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, RedHat KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V)
• Programming & Scripting Languages (Ruby, Java, Groovy, Powershell, Scala, Erlang, Akka, Clojure) to name a few
• DevOps
• Cloud Services (They are too numerous to mention in this post, but I will create a list soon)

It appears that VMware is looking at Ruby (or at least they are talking to Yukihiro Matsumoto – @yukihiro_matz on Twitter) as seen in this FourSquare Checkin screenshot below:

Based on this I did some googling and here is what I have found so far:

• This The Register Article talks about VMware looking to both Ruby and PHP as part of their Cloud Application Platform.
• There was also a rumor a few months ago on GigaOM about VMware acquiring EngineYard (There hasn’t been anything announced or said since).
• An article in the SDTimes about EngineYard using Terremark as a platform for Ruby with VMware as the middle layer and calling it xCloud.
• And this article from Steve Jin talks about automating vSphere using JRuby
• Finally this link on The Ruby Reflector site has stories about both New Relic (story here) and Opscode and mentions both Ruby and VMware (Opscode mentioning other Cloud Companies using their Chef solution as well)

So what is the takeaway from all of this?
VMware appears to be looking at Ruby or JRuby as a possible 3rd major programming language to bring under its wing. More interestingly is that Ruby/JRuby could be used to weave Cloud Services and Applications together and automate them on the backend. This can be done with Java, but the learning curve for and administrator would be high compared to leveraging Ruby (especially if the admin already understands Powershell).

On a side note – I’ve become very active on Twitter, feel free to follow me for realtime info. @mccrory