Gary Phillips is CEO of Marathon Technologies, a leading provider of high availability software and service solutions focused on keeping critical business process applications running. With virtualization becoming an increasingly hot topic in the high availability space we wanted to get Marathon’s take. Virtualization is a market we continue to invest in and follow closely. Gary agreed to answer our questions on the growing high availability market and the benefits of virtualization.

Q: What opportunities did Marathon identify for its high availability solutions in the manufacturing, financial services, media and broadcast, gaming, healthcare, government, and IT infrastructure industries? Which industry has proved to be the most receptive to Marathon’s offering?

Gary: All the of these industries place a significant value on insuring that their business critical applications are continuously available for their customers, employee’s and partners. Our software is used by over 1,500 companies in over 30 countries. Each industry has a number of applications that must be able to “compute-thru” any fault or failure to insure continuity of operations, no disruption to the applications and no loss of data. Common applications that Marathon software protects include process control systems, production manufacturing, financial transactions, compliance, on-air broadcasting, slot machine – player bonusing, building access & security system, call centers and hospital care systems. We have a large installed base and market acceptance in manufacturing, in particular process manufacturing where we insure continuity of their production operations. We also have a lot of momentum in building access and security applications, as well core IT infrastructure systems such as Exchange, SQL, Oracle, File & Print, etc.

Q: In the near future, which additional industries do you see Marathon targeting?

Gary: Over the last year we have greatly expanded our customer base in the Gaming industry through our partnership with two of the industry’s leading application vendors. These vendors provides solutions servicing the casino market. The cost of downtime in this market is extremely high and they expect “low touch” technology solutions deployed on the gaming floor. Marathon provide a completely integrated solution with these ISV’s that assures the uptime and availability of slot machines for customers - without the traditional complexity and maintenance associated with traditional HA alternatives.

Q: How has high availibity been a strong market driver in infrastructure software?

Gary: We have seen significant growth in the area’s of email and database protection for higher availability. Because the productivity impact of email downtime can be so crippling, Exchange has become a business critical application for most companies. Another factor that works in our favor, more and more companies are demanding high availability solutions that are easy to install and maintain, and compliment their existing infrastructure. Marathon’s software requires no modification of the applications and therefore the IT costs to implement and maintain are dramatically reduced. Many customers turn to us because they want turnkey solutions that don’t require integrating multiple HA technologies or dealing with the time consuming set-up, policy management and ongoing administration of traditional HA solutions, such as Clustering technologies.

Q: How has the need for high availability solutions developed since you were founded in 1993?

Gary: The need for high availability solutions has dramatically increased as professionals across all industries have become increasingly dependent on their IT infrastructure. For example in Healthcare, Primary Care Physicians are now utilizing 100% digital offices. Everything from the patient’s records to x-rays to prescriptions are generated, accessed and acted upon digitally. The underlying IT infrastructure cannot experience “unplanned downtime”; if so, patient care would be directly affected. We talked earlier about how even email has become business critical, and therefore has to be highly available.

Also, over the past decade Microsoft Windows has been pervasively deployed for running business-critical applications. When we made the bet on Windows in the data center, we made a big gamble that is now really paying off. Of course, along with Windows in the data center comes a new set of expectations regarding price, ease of implementation and ongoing management.

Q: What are some of the present challenges in your industry? How is Marathon prepared to address those issues?

Gary: Virtualization is a hot topic in our industry today, and for good reason. Virtualization brings many benefits: better server utilization, lower capital and operating expenses, and greater flexibility to meet business needs. But virtualization also brings unintended consequences. One of the unintended consequences is that virtualization dramatically increases the need for rock-solid availability. Because server consolidation can result in the server becoming the single point of failure for multiple applications, the implications of downtime are much greater. We refer to this as the “all eggs in one basket syndrome.”

The current availability solutions don’t provide the rock-solid availability and simplicity of management that is needed to bring the benefits of virtualization to a much larger market. To address this challenge, we have launched our v-Available initiative to bridge today’s gap between virtualization and availability. Combined with XenSource’s hypervisor, our next generation everRun software will provide an ideal combination of price/performance, ease of use, and fault-tolerant class availability for mid-sized and smaller enterprises.

Q: Recently there has been a lot of talk about “Virtualization 2.0.” How does Virtualization 2.0 impact Marathon?

Gary: John Humphreys, a senior analyst at IDC, was one of the first to coin the term “Virtualization 2.0”. In summary, John is saying that the next wave of server virtualization adoption will be driven by virtualization management, high availability and disaster recovery. To that end, we are in the center of Virtualization 2.0. Our value proposition is to deliver fault-tolerant class availability and disaster recovery solutions for applications that may or may not be residing in a virtual environment. Over the past 14 years, we developed our own virtualization layer that is a core technology in the everRun product line. Given our years of experience in both availability/disaster recovery solutions and virtualization, we are uniquely qualified to help drive this next wave of virtualization adoption.

Source interview found here.