CBT Systems, Marimba to Deliver First Interactive Courseware Titles for Castanet and Bongo

Business Wire, Feb 24, 1997

MENLO PARK, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 24, 1997--CBT Systems Ltd., a global leader in the development and delivery of interactive education software, and Marimba, Inc., developer of the Castanet system of Internet and enterprisewide business application deployment, today announced an agreement to work together to design and develop the first interactive courseware for Marimba's Castanet content and application deployment tools, and Bongo, a visual tool for authoring Java applications and creating graphical user interfaces.

"We're delighted to be working with CBT Systems, a company widely recognized for its ability to deliver quality interactive courseware for the industry's leading technologies," said Kim Polese, president and chief executive officer of Marimba. "We're confident that developers wanting to quickly become proficient in using Castanet and Bongo will benefit greatly from our close collaboration with CBT Systems."

"Marimba has taken the development community by storm with its revolutionary approach to deploying content and applications over the Internet and enterprise," said James J. Buckley, CBT Systems president and chief executive officer. "Our goal is to work with Marimba to deliver courseware that helps developers quickly unlock the full potential of the Castanet and Bongo technologies."

Marimba announced last month the general availability of Castanet and Bongo. Castanet enables the distribution and automatic maintenance of applications and rich-content "channels" across the Internet and within corporate networks. Bongo, a visual interface builder for Java applications, enables the development of media-rich Castanet channels. According to Marimba, tens of thousands of copies of the Castanet tuner have been downloaded from Marimba's website at http://www.marimba.com since its introduction last fall.

Marimba, Inc. is a privately held applications technology company whose products enable developers to create, deploy and maintain robust network-managed applications and multimedia experiences within enterprises and across the Internet. Founded in February 1996 by four members of the original Java development team at Sun Microsystems, including Jonathan Payne, Kim Polese, Sami Shaio and Arthur van Hoff, Marimba received its initial round of venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

CBT Systems Ltd. (NASDAQ: CBTSY), a subsidiary of CBT Group PLC, is a leading provider of interactive education software designed to meet the information technology training needs of businesses and organizations worldwide. The company develops, publishes and markets a broad library of more than 300 software titles, covering a comprehensive range of client-server, Internet, and corporate intranet technologies. CBT Systems' products are used by more than 1,200 of the world's leading corporations to train employees to develop and apply mission-critical technologies in the workplace.

The company works with leading software companies, including Cisco, Lotus, Informix, Marimba, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, Oracle, Powersoft, and Sun Microsystems to develop and market vendor-specific training.

For information on CBT Systems products, call (800) 387-0932, fax (415) 614-5901, or send an email to salesinfo@cbtsys.com. CBT Systems is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.cbtsys.com. -0-

Note to Editors: All company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

CONTACT: CBT Systems Ltd.

Cindy McCaffrey, 415/614-5962

cindy_mccaffrey@cbtsys.com

or

Niehaus Ryan Group Public Relations (for Marimba)

Cindi Shandera, 415/827-7038

cindi@nrgpr.com