Marathon Technologies Corporation, the leading provider of automated, fault tolerant-class availability solutions for virtual and physical environments, today announced that Jerry Melnick will assume the newly created position of Chief Technology Officer. In addition, startup veteran Bill Tao has joined Marathon as the new vice president of engineering.

In his new role as CTO, Jerry is responsible for leading Marathon's v- Available™ -- initiative designed to drive the convergence of availability and virtualization technologies. Under Jerry's leadership, Marathon is developing the first-ever fault tolerant-class software solution for virtual environments. With Jerry leading the engineering effort, Marathon was awarded "Best of VMworld 2007 - New Technology" for showcasing software-only fault tolerant machines. Jerry will play a key role as the technical voice of Marathon, working in conjunction with our strategic partners.

Bill Tao joins Marathon with more than 20 years of high tech development leadership experience and a successful track record in leading engineering teams within entrepreneurial companies. Before Marathon, Bill was the head of engineering for IBM WebSphere/DataPower business unit via IBM's acquisition of DataPower. He was the VP of Engineering, and one of the founding executives, of DataPower, where he led the development of a groundbreaking XML Web Services appliance product line. Before DataPower, Bill was the VP of Engineering at Sirocco Systems, which was acquired by Sycamore Networks.

"The role of CTO is critical to Marathon's success in the rapidly expanding and rapidly changing virtualization marketplace," said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon Technologies. "We are pleased to have an executive with Jerry's experience to assume that role, and to find an executive of Bill's caliber to be our next VP of Engineering."