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Blog

We’re very excited to announce our partnership with NEC Philips Unified Solutions today. Through this partnership, Marathon’s everRun software will provide high availability and fault tolerant capabilities for several of NEC Philips’ business communication systems, including the SIP@Net server and Business ConneCT and MA4000 applications. These new combined offerings will be available to channel partners and customers throughout EMEA.

From left to right:
Gerard Wubben, General Manager, Raxco Software; Nick Turnbull, VP International Sales, Marathon Technologies; Rafael Costa, VP Worldwide Sales Marathon Technologies; Yoshihiko Katsura, Senior VP Portfolio, Applications & Operations NEC Philips Unified Solutions; Paul Kievit, President NEC Philips Unified Solutions; Jim Welch, President & CEO Marathon Technologies; Benne van der Lugt, Director Enterprise solutions portfolio NEC Philips Unified Solutions; and Marco Koenen, Enterprise Business Manager NEC Philips Unified Solutions
 

Signing the agreement: Paul Kievit, President NEC Philips Unified Solutions and Jim Welch, President & CEO Marathon Technologies

Business continuity planning ranks among the top trends in a recent Dimension Data report on contact center technology. Yet many call centers aren’t equipped to deal with unexpected downtime from a system failure. These centers would lose productivity and sacrifice service levels when mission-critical tools like real-time reporting systems go dark.

Real-time reporting provider Inova Solutions, along with new partner Marathon Technologies, will host a webinar to discuss best practices for business continuity and high availability in the contact center. Presenter Scott Thompson from Marathon Technologies will discuss how to protect your real-time reporting investment from costly downtime and data loss.

Participants can register for the webinar here. Details are below:

What: Webinar: “Assessing the Impact of Planned and Unplanned Downtime in the Contact Center”
When: Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 2:00 pm EST

via Inova Solutions website.

Citrix Summit is a major event for Citrix partners to learn the best new technology products for application delivery infrastructure solutions. The event was a few weeks ago, and it is worth noting that in the keynote presentation, delivered by Mark Templeton, President and CEO, and Peter Blum, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, they demonstrated Marathon’s everRun VM Level 3 protecting XenApp. What the audience saw was how everRun provided continuous availability for XenApp – even when they unplugged one of the servers.

Did anyone have a chance to see this demo live? What did you think?

Yesterday our partner, Fort Lauderdale based Citrix, announced that they would be expanding its team to the Boston area where they would set up shop for their virtualization business with new offices in Bedford, MA. The virtualization business continues to grow steadily as companies seek ways to minimize power costs and mitigate risk; so being centralized in a tech-savvy labor market is beneficial to Citrix’ success. This expansion is expected to bring 250 workers into the space in the next 12 – 18 months.

We are looking forward to Citrix’ expansion and are eager to continue to work with our partner, who’s now right around the corner. Congrats!

A common question we get from analysts and something that continues to come up in discussions (see Brian Madden’s blog) is why we developed everRun VM for XenSource and not VMware. One of the biggest obstacles in developing a version of our software for protecting virtual environments was making a strategic decision on which hypervisor platform to develop for initially. Some of the key factors that weighed in on our decision were:

• Virtualization platform market share
• Robustness of the virtualization platform
• Performance of the virtualization platform
• Openness of the architecture
• Virtualization vendor’s approach to partnerships
• Compatibility with future Microsoft virtualization platforms

Although VMware was the clear market leader, for most of the criteria, XenSource (now Citrix Virtualization and Management Division) was a much better fit. To acheive the superior availability that everRun VM uniquely provides, it had to be tightly integrated with the hypervisor, the openness of the architecture was very important. And since our solution would be directed at virtualizing applications that weren’t being virtualized yet, in part due to concerns about their performance in virtual machines, the near “bare-metal” performance of XenServer was also a major advantage. XenSource’s philosophy of growing through an ecosystem of technology partners gave us the confidence that they would get the technical, management and marketing support required to achieve our time-to-market objectives. Finally, because of the company’s relationship with Microsoft and the planned interoperability between the XenServer platform and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, we are confident that developing for XenServer now would provide the shortest path to supporting Microsoft Hyper-V when it becomes available.

If you have any additional questions feel free to leave us a comment.

A few months back, we left some clues here on the blog regarding a new partnership that would “put everRun in the hands of one of the leading global transaction processing solutions.” Yesterday, Fundtech, the leading provider of global electronic payment, settlement and cash management solutions, announced their partnership with us to protect their customers from planned and unplanned downtime.

Fundtech is OEMing everRun software to integrate with their cash management and payment software to help ensure their customers can feel secure and sleep better at night.

Maybe we should branch into the mattress business as well?

Many of you probably know that we recently announced a long-term partnership with XenSource to ensure a genuine fault tolerant solution for hypervisors. Yesterday’s announcement highlighting Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource (which you can read more about here, here and here) is a great one, for both the virtualization and application management marketplaces. From a market perspective, this announcement further validates the quality of the XenSource product and presents a solid alternative for companies that don’t want to be tied into virtualization offerings from just a single vendor. And from a customer perspective, it’s always more beneficial to have options, so it’s good to see there is more than one company making noise and providing solutions. This whole arena has taken another developmental leap forward and we welcome what’s to come.

What a week it’s been for us here at Marathon. In case you haven’t seen our announcements, we want to fill you in on our strategic positioning. Yesterday, we announced our collaboration with the global leader in facility management and control, Johnson Controls, Inc. This partnership has introduced our everRun solution to a wide range of customers, including the Gerald R. Ford International Airport. The airport uses a combined Johnson Controls and Marathon everRun solution to keep a critical access control system available 24/7/360.

Today’s news: Marathon has been targeted by Transpara Corporation in a partnership which utilizes everRun in combination with Visual Key Performance Indicator (KPI) software for mobile devices. Transpara currently provides the only software available for mobile devices which delivers on-demand operations data to handhelds and browsers such as: SmartPhones, PDAs and Blackberry’s. As we see more and more decision makers utilizing mobile devices to aggregate data from multiple sources, 24/7 access is a necessity and Marathon is happy to be at the forefront of an emerging market.

Stay tuned for a third partnership announcement that will put everRun in the hands of one of the leading global transaction processing solutions.

We had the opportunity to speak with Brian Ducharme from Virtual Strategy Magazine back on April 17 when we announced our v-Available initiative and partnership with XenSource. If you are curious as to why we partnered with XenSource, give a listen as we go into greater detail about our reasoning. In addition, we share how we eliminate some of the barriers for adoption of virtualization. Listen to the podcast and our thoughts on providing true availability solutions for server virtualization.

Any company that’s considering moving critical workloads from a physical to a virtual environment has probably already discovered that there is a serious lack of high availability and disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments. This is one of the key factors that is holding up broader adoption of server virtualization - especially among midsized and smaller companies who don’t have dedicated resources available to throw at their virtual environments. To date, there’s really no viable, simple, proven and cost effective way for businesses (big or small) to confidently deploy business process applications on top of today’s virtualization technologies.

The benefits of server virtualization are indeed significant, and not just for large corporations. But to drive broader adoption of virtualization, organizations have to be confident that their critical information is protected. Any company looking to cut deployment and maintenance costs should have the option to consider virtualization - without “availability” fear and without the unintended consequences of denser server workloads.

Next week, we at Marathon are announcing an initiative that will enable “availability” for virtualized environments for use in large and small organizations alike. As part of this initiative, we’re announcing a partnership with one of the major virtualization vendors. This partnership will accelerate virtual server adoption by legitimizing the need for real industrial strength “availability” solutions for virtual environments. Check back with us next week to learn more. In the meantime, leave a comment here if you have any questions.

Today, we announced the closing of the Series B round of funding. You can read more about it here. We’re excited and eager to expand everRun’s reach and improve the uptime of your critical applications. Of course, we’d like to thank the folks at Sierra, Atlas and Longworth for their kind words and encouragement and look forward to a banner 2007!