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Thursday, August 5th, 2010 - 10:18 am EDT

Why Settle for Less?

Posted by: Rob Ciampa

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.
-- Thomas A. Edison


“So I hear you’re going to Marathon,” a good friend said to me over the phone just before I started here recently. “I understand they’ve got some really cool technology to prevent downtime. I could probably use it, but I’ve just come to accept regular downtime as a fact of life, especially with applications such as email.”


“What do you do when you're down?” I inquired.


“Not much.” He responded. “As a manager, I rely on email for much of my project-based activities. But the outages seem to last much longer than one would expect. The last one was several hours.”


“That,” I said, “is precisely why I found the Marathon opportunity so interesting. It seems as if everyone is settling for less and that downtime is OK. Where’s the discontent? The angst? Finally, we’re starting to see the frustration level rise. Our world has fundamentally changed and our reliance on technology is a critical element of many things in our lives. When one of the critical apps on my mobile phone isn’t working, I’m down too. Market expectations and reality are misaligned, which creates a great opportunity for Marathon, its customers, and its prospects. That’s incredibly exciting. Plus they have thousands of customers. Those are quite a few proof points.”
 

Over the years, I have been an engineer, an entrepreneur, a systems integrator, a consultant, a channel manager, and a marketer. I built radars, operating systems, computing platforms, embedded systems, data centers, corporate networks, carrier networks, and worldwide internet service providers. In every single project – large or small – my teams and I always had the fundamental challenge: how do we keep the systems running? How do we keep them available? In some instances, lives depended upon uptime.
 

What did we do to address this? We just focused on recovery in the event of failure(s) because we never had a prevention mindset. That’s the Marathon differentiation that I found so appealing. It’s a powerful model. When I heard about customers such as Abercrombie & Fitch running for years without an outage or data loss, I quickly realized that prevention works. Why settle for less?

 

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