Oracle Acquires Ksplice for Zero-Downtime Linux Update Technology
July 21, 2011
Oracle Corporation acquired Ksplice, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that created zero-downtime update technology for Linux. Founded by Jeff Arnold, Tim Abbott, Waseem Daher, and Anders Kaseorg — all MIT alumni and TJHSST graduates — Ksplice grew out of Arnold's award-winning MIT master's thesis and won the 2009 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
At the time of acquisition, over 700 companies were using Ksplice to protect more than 100,000 servers. The technology allowed administrators to apply kernel security updates and critical bug fixes without rebooting, eliminating costly downtime.
The Ksplice co-founders went on to build more companies: Tim Abbott led the open-source revival of Zulip (acquired by Dropbox), while Arnold and Daher co-founded Pilot, a bookkeeping service that reached unicorn status with backing from Jeff Bezos and Stripe.