Media darling Marimba Inc, the company founded by renegade Sun Microsystems Inc developers and headed by the charismatic Kim Polese, has scored two important new deals for its Castanet software. Seagate Technology Inc has chosen Castanet for a Java- based sales forecasting application. The forecaster will run on Seagate’s corporate intranet alongside the company’s automation system, Sale Force 2000. Meanwhile PC financial software specialist Intuit plans to use Castanet to deliver net-based products and services to its world customer base. Marimba made its name as a push player, but as the great push hype of 1996 fades into memory and content provider PointCast Inc treads ever more uncertainly (CI No 3,413), Polese is working hard to shrug off the now-unmarketable appellation. At the Hambrecht & Quist technology conference in San Francisco last month, she was at pains to describe the technology underlying Castanet 2.0 as application distribution and management (ADM), while in her Networld+Interop keynote, Polese criticized dumb push for merely shoveling content onto the web. Marimba’s alternative business model is to sell Castanet as an invisible, utility-like delivery mechanism for software upgrades within large organizations. Hence the Seagate and Intuit deals. Maybe if Castanet can broadcast Quicken upgrades as easily as it once downloaded news and entertainment channels, Marimba can finally escape the pull of push. รก
