Yochi Slonim, a veteran Israeli tech entrepreneur, has always found it difficult to describe the products he develops in layman's terms. Not anymore.
His latest effort, called a Software Black Box Flight Recorder, does exactly what its name suggests. Like the device in an airplane used to track the last minutes before a crash, Slonim's Black Box records the infrastructure of a server, then plays back a failed scenario and pinpoints the root cause of a problem. "You tell the average person that what we have is a black box for software, and they know what you mean," Slonim says. "When I joined Mutek, it was the first time in my career that my mother could understand what I was doing."
The concept may be simple, but the technology behind Slonim's company, Mutek Solutions, has a fairly high barrier to entry. When the Black Box software is installed on a server, it transparently records online activity at multiple levels, synchronizing everything from the user's experience down to the program's code lines. The Black Box – designed to be particularly useful for mission-critical software, providing alerts prior to system failures and ultimately decreasing a server's downtime – has caught the attention of some high-profile customers and partners. Microsoft has a global license for Mutek's Black Box, which it uses primarily to test software in development. Mutek recently penned strategic agreements with Intel and Sun Microsystems to jointly create and market Black Boxes for their latest servers.
Mutek is the first startup the 39-year-old Slonim has helmed, but he's no stranger to high-tech. After getting his master's degree in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1989, Slonim was part of a handful of engineers who started Mercury Interactive, an application testing company led by Israeli entrepreneur Aryeh Feingold. In 1996, while Slonim was heading Mercury's product development division, he was approached by a group of Russian engineers with technology used to reverse-engineer software, which had the ability to record the internal activity of a program down to the execution of an application at the code level. "I had developed a lot of products by this time at Mercury," Slonim says, "but when we looked at this technology, we could not understand how these guys were doing it." At Slonim's request, Mercury assigned resources and engineers to the task, and Mutek was formed.
Slonim served on Mutek's board from its inception, but it wasn't until 1998 that he hit upon the idea of using the technology's unique recording ability as a software black box. Until then, the company had primarily focused its technology as an aid to software development. "It kept me up at night, trying to think of how something like this could be leveraged in a much bigger way," Slonim says. "Once we had the black box idea, we had to find the airplane. We decided it was the server." By May 2000, Slonim left his job as an executive vice president at software vendor Technomatix Technologies, where he managed 500 people, to devote his energy at Mutek full-time as the company's president and CEO. Slonim's first goal was to raise funding. Earlier this year, with investors like Intel 64, Evergreen and Nippon, Mutek completed a fourth round of financing at $28 million, bringing the company's total to more than $50 million.
Slonim, a fourth-degree black belt in karate, says he received much of his entrepreneur training during his time at Mercury. But the time he spent as a paratrooper in the Israeli army didn't hurt either. "Maybe that's why I'm thinking about black boxes all the time," he says. "A black box is like a time tunnel in a way. It takes you back in time to see what happened. Everyone wants to know why something crashed, but you have to be there to understand, or you have to be able to go back in time. We have given that ability to the server."
