Contact: John Abbott, Thejeswi Venkatesh
The writing was on the wall when Marathon Technologies sold off its patent portfolio to Citrix in September 2011. Finally, the high availability software company has been acquired by veteran fault-tolerant server vendor Stratus Technologies.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Since its relaunch in January 2004 (when the company emerged from receivership), Marathon has raised roughly $34m from Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture Partners, Presidio Ventures and Sierra Ventures, including debt financing of $7m.
Stratus had no real need for Marathon’s technology, having developed its own high availability software four years ago. However, Marathon’s technology was more mature and had more customers. Stratus will gain an expanded customer base and potential buyers of its fault-tolerant hardware range, which was refreshed earlier this month with Intel E5 processors. Having partnered with VMware, Stratus now gets a chance to develop a partnership with Citrix, with which Marathon had a close relationship.
The focus of both high availability and disaster recovery has shifted to the virtualization layer – first VMware with Site Recovery Manager, and then Citrix and Red Hat, which are both developing native capabilities for their hypervisors. There are also younger independent replication suppliers such as InMage and Zerto coming out with hypervisor-based replication software. More recently, there’s been a further shift toward cloud infrastructure software stacks. We’ll have a full report on Stratus’ reach for Marathon in our next Daily 451.