Mark Gerhard, Trailblazer

Mark Gerhard has always had a deep love of technology and gaming, and has held executive positions in companies ranging from IT services to lottery security. It was while he was Principal Security Architect responsible for the National Lottery that he became fascinated by Jagex, the creators of the online fantasy game RuneScape. He knew he had to join the company.

“I really thought I was already at the sharp end of technology but joining Jagex showed me there was still a whole lot more to learn."

A year later, he had become CEO with a vision to build on Jagex’s phenomenal success as the UK’s largest independent games developer and publisher, and take it forward into exciting new R&D projects.

RuneScape is recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world’s most popular free massively multi-player online role-playing game (that’s MMORPG to gamers). With over 10 million active players around the globe, RuneScape is a true 24/7 business which simply can’t afford a minute’s downtime.

“We’ve got tons of different pieces of technology working together on RuneScape and a few hundred thousand people playing it at any one time, all over the world. A moment of downtime means we’ve got hundreds of thousands of very angry people! We don’t get to do planned maintenance; we can’t switch our servers off at 3am on a Sunday morning.”

With over 200 servers running the world of RuneScape, Mark needs an utterly reliable and truly global server provider.

“We use Dell servers for our entire public infrastructure. They host all our games, websites and forums, and we also use them internally for our own file servers, databases servers and mail servers. We use Dell exclusively because we want one vendor to provide us with everything worldwide. I want to be able to say ‘I need these servers and these firewalls in this location in seven days time.’ Dell does that.”

“Oh, one other thing about our Dell servers, we hardly ever re-boot them”, “our forums server, which is also one of the biggest in the world, has not been restarted in years.”

Jagex is a highly complex and exceptionally busy operation, so support beyond the call of duty is critical for Mark Gerhard.

“We get great service from Dell. It’s best described as 'enterprise service’ as in we’re really important – well, we get to feel that way! But it’s absolutely imperative to us because if we don’t provide good service to our players, they go and play some other game. We’re about player retention and building a community, and we expect our suppliers to help us achieve that.”

Great challenges lie ahead for Mark Gerhard and Jagex as RuneScape continues to evolve and other games are born, but he recognises the need to not let success change the nature of the company. It’s something he feels is integral to the game plan of any budding entrepreneur.

“We’re not a classic ‘corporate company’. I think we’re successful because of our passion for technology and games. Don’t become a big corporate behemoth but keep to your roots.”