Marathon Innovations' mission is to be the leading supplier of Web-based Marketing Automation Software (MAS) solutions focused on automating and managing the workflows of marketing departments, ad agencies, and publishing organizations. Marathon's products reduce time and costs associated with media and content development, while improving overall quality. Marathon's MAS solutions provide support for a wide variety of media development, including print and the Web, utilizing the most advanced Internet-based workflow automation technologies.

Marketing, ad agency, and publishing operations typically interface with many external agencies and vendors, which requires systems that can be extended to third parties. Until the advent of the Web, automation of these kinds of workflow was severely limited. Now, with remote access possible through browsers, the workflow among the PR firm, ad agency, direct mail firm, fulfillment house, events management, and all the in-house departments can be integrated.

Marathon Innovations was founded in November 1998 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. It is a spin-off from The Marathon Group, an RTP-base Internet consulting company founded in 1984 that today provides pre-press services, eCommerce site development, as well as business process automation consulting services.

Marathon's software products are the result of three years of design, development, and field testing with leading marketing, ad agency, and publishing organizations. We pride ourselves on Web-based solutions that are easy to use and to modify because the interface terminology, workflow definer, and media management are geared toward communications professionals, not IT.

Marathon Innovations is a privately held firm that is backed by the Triangle's leading venture capital firm, Intersouth Partners. In October 1998, Marathon raised $2.5 million in venture funding.

SmartPath MAS™
SmartPath MAS solves time-to-market issues for media development. It leverages the most advanced process management technology available, incorporates a powerful media management engine, and utilizes a proven application model for Web-based media development. SmartPath MAS automates and streamlines the processes that support the planning, development, review, revision, approval, publishing, and distribution of promotional materials and content. Traffic, editorial, and production groups within marketing and publishing organizations, as well as external departments, vendors, and agencies, can perform their day-to-day functions online in a fully coordinated workflow-reducing costs and cycle times and improving quality.

The SmartPath MAS Web-based solution is the first business-process application specifically targeted at automating and managing the processes that support media development for promotions (advertisements, brochures, packaging, etc.) and content (catalogs, Web sites, etc.). Supporting a wide variety of digital media on the industry's most popular computing platforms, Marathon Innovations has incorporated into SmartPath MAS their extensive knowledge of marketing and publishing operations.

Users can easily define systems to automate process workflows, manage associated digital documents and media, and integrate with existing data processing systems. The process owner, such as the Traffic Department, uses out-of-the-box templates to define process flows expressed in familiar terms. A powerful and unique feature of SmartPath MAS is its adaptive workflow capability that enables processes to be dynamically modified to fit an individual job, all active jobs, or all future jobs while the process is actually executing.

SmartPath MAS provides a business-level approach that empowers marketing and publishing organizations to focus on the development of the media for promotions and content rather than the manual tasks to manage and coordinate the effort. The SmartPath MAS graphical process definer provides business managers visual models to analyze and respond to change with unprecedented speed and flexibility.

Management Team
Marathon Innovations has an experienced management team with proven track records in the high tech industry. The team also has extensive knowledge and experience in the arenas of Web-based process automation as well as marketing and publishing operations.

Ken Romley, President and CEO
Mr. Romley serves as President and CEO of Marathon Innovations, with more than ten years of consulting and information technology management experience.

In 1991, Ken co-founded Burl Software, where he served as President and Chief Technical Architect for the legacy application analysis tool Revolve. In 1994, Burl Software was acquired by Micro Focus. The Revolve product line now contributes over $100 million in revenue to Micro Focus annually. Ken continued with Micro Focus as Vice President, heading the international development division that created Micro Focus's flagship product, COBOL Workbench. His responsibilities included overseeing seventy-five developers, providing technical vision for future products, and ensuring that projects came in on time and under budget. Ken left Micro Focus in 1997 to become a managing partner at The Marathon Group.

Ken has a B.S. in Operations Research and a M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University. He began his professional career with Price-Waterhouse, where he successfully guided Fortune 500 customers as a technical management consultant.

Richard Phelps, Ph.D., Vice President of Marketing
Dr. Phelps serves as Vice President of Marketing at Marathon Innovations, with more than twenty years of experience in software marketing, business development, and product management. From 1997 to 1998, Rick was Vice President of Marketing and a founding member of the executive management team of Relativity Technologies in Cary, North Carolina. In 1993, Rick co-founded the Antares Alliance Group, a developer of enterprise application development tools and a joint venture of EDS and Amdahl in Dallas. Rick served as Vice President of Business Development and later as Vice President of Marketing. During his tenure at Antares, the company grew from $0 to $41 million in annual sales.

In 1989, Rick joined Ernst & Young as the National Marketing Director for E&Y's IT Consulting Practice based in New York. He was responsible for the development, packaging, marketing and deployment of E&Y's portfolio of IT consulting services, including Software Reengineering and Enterprise Application Development. Before this, Rick was Vice President of Marketing and a co-founder of Cortex Corporation, a developer of enterprise application development tools in Boston. Rick began his career in 1978 at Exxon Enterprises, based in Boston, where he served as Director of Product Management for speech recognition systems.

Brent Dessenberger, Vice President of Sales
Mr. Dessenberger serves as Vice President of Sales at Marathon Innovations. He has more than twenty-two years of experience in the information technology industry as well as in commercial customer experience, including manufacturing, petro-chemical, retail, and banking. After earning his B.A. in Business Administration from Wichita State University, he furthered his studies at Central State University focusing on Computer Science. Brent then joined the team at Amdahl, where he won several sales awards and guided technical hardware and software sales. Brent further honed his sales and management skills at Hitachi Data Systems and Storage Technology. At Micro Focus, he was named marketing representative of the year. Brent recently joined the team at The Marathon Group from Relativity Technologies, where he headed North American Sales.

David Babson, Chief Technology Officer
Mr. Babson is Chief Technology Officer for The Marathon Group, bringing more than eleven years of extensive experience working with communications technologies and enterprise information systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Brown University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University. He spent several years working at Bellcore where he was the lead inventor on four patents, including one that was included in R&D Magazine's 100 Most Technologically Significant Inventions of 1992. David formed Burl Software in 1991, where he served as Vice President of Marketing. His responsibilities included the development and marketing of Revolve, a legacy applications analysis tool. In 1994, Burl Software was acquired by Micro Focus; as Vice President of Micro Focus, David headed Revolve product development and defined the company's Year 2000 offerings. In 1997, David left Micro Focus to join The Marathon Group.

Michael Doernberg, Vice President of Business Development
Mr. Doernberg serves as Vice President of Business Development for Marathon Innovations, bringing more than eleven years of experience in business development and project management to the company. He graduated from North Carolina State University in 1986 and began his career at Ernst and Young in 1987. After several years in general accounting he moved up to the role of manager in entrepreneurial services. There he worked with high technology start-up companies to raise capital and develop business opportunities. He participated in two successful IPOs and has worked with many companies whose cutting-edge technology development was sought after by the Big Six.

In 1992, he left Ernst and Young to head up the team at The Marathon Group, overseeing day-to-day operations and bringing the company to the forefront of full systems integration and application development. Today, he focuses his energy on developing enterprise software solutions for our customers, maximizing the use of our technical staff, and finding new enterprise applications for our cutting-edge software packages.