Marimba drums up Timbale

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February 21, 2000
Web posted at: 8:55 a.m. EST (1355 GMT)

by Stephanie Sanborn

(IDG) -- Targeting business-to-business commerce, Web commerce, and thin-client environments, Marimba this week unveiled its Timbale product line to manage server content replication and distribution.

Using a strategy akin to content delivery, Timbale tackles server access and management by relocating resources.

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"What we're seeing is a trend toward moving the logic that used to reside at a corporate data center and getting it out to distributed data centers [and] remote offices," said Robert Ha, director of marketing at Marimba. "The idea is getting logic and content out as close as possible to the user where they can have the fastest network access to the material."

Ha said Timbale is not exactly the same as content delivery because it uses no cache devices, but it does play a foundation role in the process.

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"You can think of this as pre-step to content delivery; before you deliver content, you need to get the content there intelligently and with control," Ha said.

Marimba is offering two Timbale products: Timbale for Server Management and Timbale for Windows Terminal Services.

"The idea is to give people flexible and intelligent control mechanisms so that they can centrally manage, deploy, and get status of deployments while being able to work with it interactively or integrate it with existing systems such as a workflow system or a database of content," Ha said.

Timbale for Server Management acts as a central control for server content deployment, including remote deployments, real-time deployment status logs, and a preview option to make sure a server has room for new content.

"We're providing a management product that gets the content out while accommodating all the back-end processes to provide good content flow and management into the system," Ha explained.

Timbale for Windows Terminal Services (WTS) focuses on managing WTS servers over distributed environments, minimizing server management task effect on users through timed/synchronized rollouts, as well as central and remote management features.

Both Timbale products also integrate with Marimba's Castanet products, which tackle infrastructure management and will be available in the spring of 2000.

According to Kathey Hale, an e-business analyst at Gartner Group, in San Jose, Calif., Timbale's content-delivery technology will be key to Marimba's success, especially because the growing appearance of broadband and other delivery technologies presents a growing market.

"Sometimes now the story in large organizations, especially with thin clients, is not just delivering a lot of applications to a desktop, but delivering applications to servers all over the world that thin clients take advantage of," Hale said. "In that sense, in these areas of content delivery, whether server-to-server or server-to-desktop [Marimba is] pointing right at an opening market window."

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