By Nick Patience
Marimba Inc is now free to talk. Indeed, it is now actively courting publicity following its quiet period leading up to its initial public offering in February. That its share price has recently taken a nose dive following a lukewarm rating from its lead underwriter as it began coverage of the stock at the start of this month is not something that co-founder and CEO Kim Polese spends too much time thinking about: volatility is a fact of life, she says.
Polese says the market is now shaping up pretty much as she and her colleagues predicted it would when they launched the company back in 1996. It was never about so-called push technology; that was just the closest available term to describe the ‘software as services’ model Marimba was extolling, which was not something that had been seen beyond the world of mainframe software leasing. Now everybody is talking about outsourcing their applications and renting them back from application and other types of service providers and Marimba is glad to hear it. It doesn’t view itself as a ‘dot com’ software company or as an enterprise software company but as somewhere between the two: an internet services management company enabling ISPs, financial services, manufacturing, and retail companies to manage and update their applications over the internet.
The Castanet software distribution, updating and management suite of products is currently on version 4.0 and available on Windows NT and Solaris, with HP-UX, AIX and Macintosh versions ready to go out the door. Additions to the product will come in the areas of distribution – the core of our family values, says Polese – monitoring and performance management. Polese declines to be specific about the additions to the product but says the company can certainly build everything it needs but then she’s not ruling out possibly buying products, technologies or companies either, if the need arises.
The company’s key deal of the moment it seems is with IBM Corp’s Tivoli Systems unit. It is currently winding down the reseller arrangement it has with Tivoli, as the IBM unit has licensed Castanet and tweaked it to come up with the Cross-Site systems management tool, which is a bit late in being launched but is apparently going gold this month. Once the product is launched, the deal will revert to an OEM arrangement and Marimba will get royalties on every seat sold by Tivoli.
Marimba says it is not actively pursuing further OEM deals at the moment, preferring to concentrate on direct sales. It currently has 72 sales people, including the reps, systems engineers and consultants, and is building out the team further. Polese cites deals with Charles Schwab, Earthlink and Intuit as the kind of companies it will continue to pursue but could not give any hint of further customer wins in the near future, although assured us that they are in the pipeline. Polese says that the company has always been fiscally conservative both in its reporting of revenues and announcement of products and customers – none of which it does until the deals are firmly in place, the product paid for and pretty much already rolling out.
Polese maintains a strong interest in the political side of things, sitting on the board of the group of Californian CEOs called Tech Net, which meets every two months and monitors developments in the debate over the US encryption laws, the caps on immigration visas, and most of all, the state of education in the US. Yahoo! Inc is apparently about to announce an implementation of the Education Dashboard application she announced a year or so ago that aims to link students, teachers and parents over the net. á
