Marimba Inc’s Castanet application distribution and management (ADM) software has entered version 3.0 with new support for Windows and Visual Basic. Castanet was born when Java pioneers Kim Polese and Arthur Van Hoff left Sun Microsystems to prove with their own startup that Java was ready for large applications. The Castanet system was originally built as a kind of push media delivery system, imagined as network broadcasting with transmitters on servers and tuners on clients. Push media, however, never lived up to its hype. CEO Kim Polese has spent most of the last year repositioning Marimba as an application management vendor, using the ‘ADM’ acronym, a company coinage, to illustrate her point (CI No 3,278). Castanet now broadcasts applications over corporate networks and includes a range of tools to manage that process, thus making CIO’s lives easier – or so the company claims. The product consists of three suites. The Infrastructure Suite now includes a license installer and certificate manager. The Production Suite has added Windows and VB packages to existing packages for C, C++ and Java. A tuner packager, a transmitter reporter and a channel copier have been added to the Management Suite. Castanet 3.0 is priced from $10,000.
