Marimba launches new Castanet with a less Java-centric focus

June 23, 1998 — The announcement today that Marimba Inc. will release the next version of its Castanet suite represents a new push for the company, which is moving away from its Java-centric approach, according to Marimba Chief Technology Officer Arthur van Hoff, in an interview here today.

“You can’t be religious about it,” van Hoff said of Java. “If you’re religious about it, you’re not going to build products that customers want.”

Castanet 3.0 allows enterprise users to control applications inside or outside of system firewalls and to distribute applications written in Visual Basic, C++, and Java over any network. Due out this month, the new version will cost US0,000. The technology behind Castanet is commonly called push, but Marimba prefers the term application distribution and management (ADM), and advocates the technology as a means for IS departments to manage software deployment.

Marimba was founded in 1996 by former Sun Microsystems Inc. employees, including van Hoff, who were on the team that created the Java programming language. While Marimba remains a Java shop internally, Castanet 3.0 is an acknowledgment that customers want more, said van Hoff, during the interview at DCI’s Database & Client/Server World and Component Directions 98, where he also spoke about component deployment.

“In 3.0 we really took a big step back and looked at how our customers are using Castanet,” he said.

Marimba customers increasingly are relying on the Internet to deploy and maintain enterprise-critical applications. ADM provides network system management on the Internet or through intranets, allowing IS managers to control who receives updates of software applications.

Castanet 3.0 consists of three suites:

• The infrastructure suite includes client-server software components and security features, as well as the Castanet Tuner client and Transmitter server.

• The production suite provides components for packaging retail or custom applications for distribution and the updated version works for Windows and Visual Basic applications.

• The management suite provides components to manage local and remote Castanet installations and applications.

“It’s a big step forward for us,” van Hoff said of the new version. “It really increases our market.”

While the company hopes to broaden its appeal, there also has been a realization that it’s not always best to align with the hottest technology. Push became most known as a means to provide information to Internet users and became the darling of marketers and advertisers. Overall however, consumers have been less than enthralled with that aspect of the technology.

“It was widely misunderstood,” van Hoff said of the technology that underlies Castanet. “We made the mistake in the last year of riding the push wave.”

Using the Internet as a platform for mission-critical applications also has been misunderstood, van Hoff said in the interview and in his talk.

“You think you’re deploying a thin client, but what you’re really doing is deploying a thin client into a thick environment,” he said, likening deployment of such applications to “Rube Goldberg devices,” referring to that inventor’s wildly complicated machines that, in the end, perform simple tasks.

Instead of keeping things simple, though, IS departments are finding that they use the Internet for critical applications and “run into problems like now we have this 10-megabit applet.”

The challenge, he said, is to fully realize the benefits of the Internet use for enterprises without allowing maintenance and management to veer out of control.