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Marathon Technologies has named Jim Welch its new president and CEO. The Littleton maker of fault tolerance software for mixed virtual and hardware environments said goodbye to former CEO Gary Phillips in July — a story Mass High Tech broke online.
Welch, a former vice president at IBM, has an executive career that has spanned two mergers and acquisitions: the 2005 acquisition of Ascential software, where he was vice president of product operations, by IBM; and the 1995 acquisition by Emerson of Intellution, where he was executive vice president of strategy planning and development.
Welch said the market for high availability software, which Marathon now faces, is similar to the situation Ascential, a maker of enterprise data integration software, encountered in the late 1990s. At the time, enterprise data integration was becoming commoditized, he said.
“We had to really reinvent ourselves,” Welch said. “I see the same kind of opportunity here for Marathon.”
However, Marathon does not plan for a hasty exit, he said. “This is not ‘let’s go find a suitor tomorrow.’”
Founded in 1993, the company went through a bankruptcy reorganization in 2003. Since then, Marathon has raised at least $27.8 million from backers including Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture and Sierra Ventures.
Welch said that, to date, the company has not successfully differentiated itself from other providers of high availability and fault tolerance systems. Going forward, Marathon will begin to think about fault tolerance “in the context of all the things that need to be available,” Welch said — including telecommunications equipment, electric power and data archives.
Marathon Technologies will also begin to focus on the small to medium-sized business market, which is joining the enterprise market in demand for high availability software. Welch plans for Marathon to continue getting enterprise business through partnerships with virtualization providers such as Microsoft, Citrix and VMware. But the mid-market will be a growth area, he predicted.
“All these companies are global in nature,” he said. “Even four hours downtime is unacceptable.”
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