L-R Jeff Arnold, president, COO Waseem Daher co-founders of Kspice.  The sells to software and system vendors (operating system vendors, telecom and networking equipment vendors, enterprise software application vendors, storage solution vendors) who want the capability of distributing rebootless updates for their products.

Ksplice will be paid in three ways: a license fee, a development fee for transforming each traditional update into a rebootless update, and a small royalty fee for each unit that features this technology.

Devices as disparate as mobile phones, set-top box, your desktop and a company's server infrastructure all suffer the fact that software updates are incredibly disruptive and painful. As computers in their various forms become more prevalent and pervasive, the need for this solution (and thus the size of the market) only grows

"Just as it is now essentially impossible to purchase a piece of audio equipment that does not feature Dolby technology, we believe that being "Ksplice-enabled" will become the de facto standard for meeting this need."

Ksplice's offering is based on  new technology developed at MIT by its founders. The chief alternative to our rebootless update technology is replication: having multiple redundant copies of a system as a way of achieving fault tolerance. When a component is taken offline for updates, the work associated with that component is shifted over to the remaining components. As a consequence, redundant systems can restart individual components, one at a time, so that the system as a whole does not experience extended downtime.

Ksplice requires no interruption of service at all--updates are applied in microseconds, and applications continue to run during the process without disruption. And it claims its solution can reduce operational complexity by eliminating the administrative overhead of preparing for a system reboot. Also replication can be quite expensive: involving extra resources that are not fully utilised.

The company has developed a subscription service for the Linux operating system. The service automatically delivers the latest vendor-released Linux security and bug-fix updates, in hot update form, to user's machines and installs them automatically. The service is offered for an annual fee based on the number of machines, just like antivirus software or an enterprise software support contract.

The service has been very popular in the fast moving Web-hosting industry that is not change-averse. Second, Linux is quite popular in the industry, as the de facto server operating system of choice, so we can leverage our preexisting implementation.

Finally, they understand the problem well: When a new update is announced, a prudent system administrator would immediately install it. Any delay could be particularly painful, since any one of the thousands of users with accounts on the Web host's machines could exploit the vulnerability and cause damage.

Sales bottleneck biggest
Our biggest bottleneck thus far is actually not technology--it is our ability to sell the software to customers at the rate of demand. Our software is deployed on approximately 10,000 systems. However, we currently only have one full-time employee devoted to marketing and sales, and the demand for the product is beginning to exceed our capacity for managing the sales process and early customer relationship.

Leads are not adequately being pursued, and if the issue is not addressed soon, money will be left on the table. We would use the Forbes prize to address this need and help get us to break even from subscription revenues, in three ways.

First, half of the cash prize will be used to pay for a software developer tasked with automating the customer acquisition and support process. If purchasing the product can be more self-serve, then less human time goes into each sale, the cost of customer acquisition goes down and profits go up.

Anyone currently running Linux servers should be able to purchase our rebootless update service just like you can buy a subscription to NetFlix or a song from iTunes, online with a credit card on a Web form.

However, this is not an immediate solution--developing such a system, while technically very straightforward, will take a little time. The rest of the cash will be used as a stopgap measure: bringing on board another salesperson to adequately address customer demand in the interim so that more of our leads turn into sales.

Finally, once the process is more self-serve and automated, the Forbes advertising component portion of the prize will be used to drive more traffic toward our site and service, ultimately selling more of our software and allowing us to grow the business even further.