Boston's Race Day Depends On Marlborough Co.
BOSTON MARATHON
Deriba Merga of Ethiopia, center, won last year's Boston Marathon. Versatile Communications of Marlborough will once again be providing IT support for real-time tracking of runners in the marathon this year.
As about 25,000 runners make the grueling trek on Marathon Monday from Hopkinton to Boston, Kevin Meany, vice president of technical services for Marlborough-based Versatile Communications, will be doing plenty of running around himself.
Meany and about a dozen Versatile workers are helping to coordinate the marathon's information technology infrastructure for the14th consecutive year.
For the last few weeks, Meany has been setting up wireless networks around Boston's Copley Place for race officials and members of the press. On race day, he'll be coordinating the real-time tracking of each runner, and perhaps most important, he'll be helping to validate the winning runner's time in one of the world's top races.
"On Monday I basically will not see the light of day," said Meany. "It's pretty much our busiest day of the year and the most work we do in the shortest amount of time. We really cannot have an outage."
Running On Data
Running IT for the Boston Marathon isn't the only thing this 25-person Marlborough company does.
Founded in 1994, Versatile works with small- and medium-sized businesses across New England on a full-range of IT infrastructure and support services.
John Barker, the company's president, said Versatile had about $14 million in revenues last year. He's hired six new workers in the last six months, mostly as regional sales representatives.
But the company in the past few years has built a business around marathons. This year, the privately-held company will work not only on the Boston Marathon, but those in New York and Chicago as well.
Versatile, and Meany specifically, got involved in helping to run some of the Boston Marathon's IT services 14 years ago, and about six years ago the company became the lead IT agency for the marathon. "It's like setting up an entire enterprise for a small company," Meany said about the Boston Marathon's IT needs.
One of the biggest parts of the job is to provide the technical infrastructure to allow for near real-time tracking of each of the more than 25,000 runners in the race.
Each runner, Meany said, wears a small chip during the race. There are more than 10 checkpoints throughout the 26.2 mile race that runners pass. At each one the runner's time is automatically fed into a large server operation Versatile has set up in the Copley Plaza Hotel.
That allows friends, family and coaches to automatically track any runners' times on the web. Each runner is also allowed to register up to three e-mail addresses or phone numbers to receive automatic progress alerts.
The tracking system is also used to make sure everyone is following the rules. If a runner misses a checkpoint or his running time is very different from his qualifying time's pace, the computer automatically flags the runner and notifies race officials.
Meany said the amount of data being processed per second has increased every year since he's worked on the marathon. He's expecting the server system to process up to one gigabyte of information per second for about six hours straight on Monday, although the system, he said, is equipped to handle up to 2 gigs per second.
"It's some pretty high-end equipment," he said. Most of the hardware has been donated over the years from various computer companies and some of the equipment is owned by Versatile. Versatile is a paid contractor for the Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the marathon.
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