Marimba Launches New Managed Service Provider — MSP — Division; Marimba.net Offers Managed Internet Services for ASPs, Appliance Vendors, Portals, and Other E-Companies

Business Wire, Oct 17, 2000

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 17, 2000

Marimba, Inc. (Nasdaq:MRBA), a leading provider of Internet infrastructure management solutions, today announced the launch of Marimba.net(TM), a new Managed Service Provider (MSP) Division of the company. Marimba also announced today that Madison Laird, an industry veteran with executive experience building Internet services businesses at IBM, Smartonline, and Encanto Networks, has been appointed the general manager of the Marimba.net Division.

Industry analysts define an MSP as a class of service provider that sells subscription services to manage information technology infrastructure and applications over the Internet. Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn. estimates that the $90 million MSP market will grow to more than $3.25 billion by 2005.

Marimba.net provides managed services that allow companies to outsource many functions of their Internet-based offerings, such as content distribution and updating, device management, and performance monitoring and reporting. By using these automated services rather than building and managing their own, appliance vendors, application service providers (ASPs), content providers, portals, and other e-companies can improve their time to market, response times and service quality, reduce both their initial investment and ongoing costs, and focus on the core elements of their business.

Initial services offered by Marimba.net include a Web-based reporting service and a fully hosted content distribution service. Both the reporting and hosted distribution services provide customers with enhanced management capabilities through a private, personal service portal that provides customers with real-time access from anywhere on the Web to a wide variety of user reports, status information, monitoring and performance data, logging and debugging information, and account management and usage statistics.

Marimba.net customers include 3Com Corporation (Nasdaq:COMS), and 3Com is utilizing Marimba.net's hosted distribution service to manage its newly launched Audrey(TM) Internet appliance. Audrey is a new kind of Internet appliance designed to reside at the nerve center of consumers' homes. It enables intuitive information access, communication and organization for entire households. Marimba.net provides 3Com with the unique ability to personalize software and content updates to Audrey, automatically and transparently to the end-user, and to collect service usage information in order to provide a consistently rich user experience.

"Because of our collaboration with the expert team at Marimba.net, we are able to deliver the rapid deployment of new content and services to our customers with a high quality of service," said John Powell, manager of applications engineering at 3Com's Internet Appliance Division.

Marimba.net's distribution service infrastructure is hosted at tier-one service provider facilities, and has been architected to provide high levels of service availability, reliability, scalability and security. Marimba.net guarantees its customers a high level of service availability through a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) that typically covers guaranteed service availability of 99.9% and 24x7 support.

"The launch of Marimba.net strengthens Marimba's execution on its founding vision of enabling the Internet to operate as a utility. We knew that to achieve that vision, information would have to be distributed over the Internet as reliably as the delivery of water or electricity and with minimal effort on the part of the end-user customer," said Kim Polese, Marimba's chairman and chief strategy officer. "Outsourcing the management of Internet-based services with Marimba.net brings that vision closer to reality for our customers."

In a separate release issued today, Marimba announced that managed services for 3Com's new Audrey Internet Appliance are being hosted and delivered via Marimba.net. See news release dated Oct. 17, 2000, "Marimba.net Provides Hosted Distribution Services for New 3Com Internet Appliance: Marimba's Managed Service Provider (MSP) Division, Marimba.net, Helps Ensure Audrey(TM) User Experience is 'Radically Simple.'"

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

Marimba.net's hosted distribution and managed reporting services are available immediately. Global distribution services, hosted at service provider facilities beyond the U.S., are planned for the first half of 2001. Pricing for the hosted distribution service is on a subscription basis, and is based upon the cost of the infrastructure components plus a per-end-point maintenance fee. Additional costs include content distribution fees, hardware rental, and optional custom component fees. Pricing for the reporting service also includes a per-end-point reporting service fee and optional custom report fees. For more information, please contact the Marimba.net sales organization at sales@marimba.net or call 650/930-5282.

ABOUT MARIMBA

Marimba is a leading provider of Internet infrastructure management solutions, enabling companies to leverage the Internet to deliver more powerful and cost-effective content, applications and services to their customers, employees and business partners. From Timbale(TM) for servers, to Castanet(R) for desktops, and UpdateNow(R) for devices, Marimba provides management solutions for the full range of Internet computing models. Marimba's Managed Service Provider (MSP) Division, Marimba.net(TM), provides content delivery, performance monitoring and reporting services that are accessed over the Internet and sold on a subscription basis. Marimba and Marimba.net are headquartered in Mountain View, and can be reached at 650/930-5282, or via email at orders@marimba.com or sales@marimba.net. For more information visit our Web sites at http://www.marimba.com and http://www.marimba.net