Ironically, one of the best places for Rails right now, lies in a place you rarely see innovation -- the big-company-internal-portal market. Most of these site

Ironically, one of the best places for Rails right now, lies in a place you rarely see innovation -- the big-company-internal-portal market. Most of these sites are built on old J2EE, STRUTS, or worse ASP stacks. They've got complex configurations, and excessively convoluted deployments, both of which contribute long lead times to updates. Rails allows for a new paradigm that quite closely fits the demands of these customers. Sacrifice a bit on the scalability / reliability end, and take advantage of Rails' agility and simple deployment structure. Because of their light traffic demands and simplistic feature sets (integrations with other internal corporate services are likely just HTTP based) corporate portals are a fantastic target for early Rails adoption. A single decent developer (the sort you can still _hire) should be able to construct and maintain a fairly complex corporate portal -- reducing development investments (whether in-house or outsourced). It will be interesting to see which "software as a service" / "software consulting" company first adopts Rails as it's status-quo for this sort of consulting...