Boston's Race Day Depends On Marlborough Company
As about 25,000 runners made the grueling trek on Marathon Monday from Hopkinton to Boston, Kevin Meany, vice president of technical services for Marlborough-based Versatile Communications, was doing plenty of running around himself.
Meany and about a dozen Versatile workers helped to coordinate the marathon’s information technology infrastructure for the 14th consecutive year.
For weeks leading up to the race, Meany had been setting up wireless networks around Boston’s Copley Place for race officials and members of the press. On race day, he coordinated the real-time tracking of each runner, and perhaps most importantly, he helped to validate the winning runner’s time in one of the world’s top races.
Running On Data
Running IT for the Boston Marathon isn’t the only thing this 25-person 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 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 race’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.
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 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.
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