http://www.marimba.com

Marimba Six Enables Continual Policy Compliance Enforcement and Features Industry Leading

Ease-of-Deployment and Reporting Capabilities

GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, ORLANDO, FL., - Oct. 20, 2003 - Marimba, Inc.

(Nasdaq: MRBA), today announced Marimba® Six, a major new release of its management suite for clients and servers, which will further reduce the cost of managing enterprise information technology (IT) assets and resources. Marimba Six provides an infrastructure that gives enterprises dynamic control of their IT resources by automating the delivery, installation, and management of applications, operating systems and patches across their enterprise.

Marimba Six extends Marimba's technology leadership with enhanced policy and on-demand management functionality, improved ease of deployment and usability, and advanced reporting capabilities. This new release builds on Marimba's existing product architecture and will allow enterprises to leverage targeted business solutions such as security patch management, license compliance, inventory management, and OS management. Marimba's integrated management solution will further reduce the total cost of ownership and improve quality of service by helping IT departments efficiently manage dynamic and heterogeneous environments.

What Enterprise Customers are Saying About Marimba Six

"Within 60 days of receiving Marimba's management software, we were able to implement and deploy software to more than 2,300 stores and across our diverse network consisting of thousands of computing devices," said Jeff Tibbitts, IT Technical Lead for Albertsons. "This quick implementation has helped us significantly reduce administration time and resources and, with the Marimba Six release, we look forward to further improving the efficiency of our systems management activities, particularly in the areas of centralized monitoring, automated remote distribution of agents, more granular inventory, and enhanced product interface. These improvements will enable us to spend more time focusing on critical initiatives and less on infrastructure maintenance."

Tibbitts added, "We are using Marimba for proactive software distribution to deploy business applications, patches, security remediation and anti-virus applications, which are all critical to our organization. Marimba is an integral component in Albertsons strategic initiatives across our environment of desktops, laptops, PDAs, and servers."

Luke Labenski, senior technical consultant for CIGNA Systems, said, "Marimba's management software has been in use for more than two years to install, inventory, and update software across our widely dispersed, heterogeneous environment. Our operations staff has been pleased with the high success rate for distributions, which results in fewer visits to the desktop. We look forward to the streamlined administration and comprehensive reporting on policy compliance in Marimba Six to let us know when our business software is updated and ensure that all computers are running needed security patches. These capabilities will allow us to react quicker to virus threats and meet business needs faster than before."

Ron Merlino, SVP Information Technology for AdvancePCS, commented, "Marimba's software management products have allowed us to continually reduce our total cost of ownership for desktops and laptops over the last three years since its deployment. What used to take hours over weekends to deploy new applications to our four remote call centers now takes minutes and is automated. Our workstation support organization has been able to easily and rapidly deploy applications, hotfixes, and updates to 6,170 computer systems across our enterprise. Marimba Six looks promising in providing enhanced capabilities for administration, maintenance, reporting, software usage and patch management that will bolster our strategy for providing proactive solutions to quickly adapt to the dynamic needs of our global operations."

Continuous, Policy-Based Software Management

Enterprises are faced with managing mission-critical changes across distributed IT environments with fewer resources than ever. Deploying applications, patches, and virus updates through traditional management tools across multiple platforms is inefficient, expensive, and prone to human error. Marimba Six will offer flexible management options to address this problem, allowing administrators to use policy-based, on-demand, or self-service methods. Through Marimba Six's policy-based architecture, administrators view a dashboard, which illustrates the state of their environment and will allow them to drill down to diagnostic information and then take immediate, automated corrective actions. With Marimba Six, administrators can proactively manage exceptions to their mandates rather than reacting to problems as they occur. In addition, Marimba has enhanced its Deployment Manager, a workflow orchestration engine, to simplify on-demand deployment across multiple tiers of servers.

"Enterprises are looking to solve their IT complexities with flexible management platforms that span desktops, servers, and mobile devices," said Ronni Colville, Research Director at Gartner, Inc. "Leveraging an integrated management solution that addresses IT needs such as patch management, application deployment, and asset tracking provides enterprise administrators with a needed solution to control their increasingly complex and expanding IT environments."

Rapid Deployment and Ease of Use

Unlike other software management solutions, Marimba Six will be easy to deploy and allow administrators to maintain frequently changing environments. Customers will be able to typically deploy Marimba Six software throughout their enterprise environment in weeks, rather than months commonly found with competitive solutions. Marimba Six's unified installation and administration will let IT departments seamlessly install Marimba software across all major platforms, through a single, centralized Web-based console. Administrators will be able to perform automated and centralized deployment of Marimba components to remote computer systems, giving enterprises greater consistency, verification and control over their IT assets and environments.

Managed Control and Visibility

Marimba's next-generation browser-based reporting tool, Report Center, will provide more than 200 out-of-the-box reports to provide administrators easier access to real-time decision making data with system information across Windows, UNIX, Mac OS, Linux, and hand-held platforms. In addition to these built-in reports, administrators can also build and customize their own reports through an intuitive query-building tool, or through SQL, providing complete flexibility in accessing the data they need. Marimba Six's reports will provide IT departments with detailed information on software, hardware, return on investment (ROI), diagnostics, and inventory data across their enterprise. Report Center also will include the ability to generate graphs or charts, and the scheduling of email reports, allowing administrators to regularly provide users and management with the information they need on an ongoing basis utilizing minimal IT personnel.

Marimba will provide a flexible and agile approach to software change management through a set of solutions, that includes:

* Patch and Virus Management - automates the identification

and deployment of hotfixes and anti-virus patches across multi-platform environments.

* Software Usage - provides IT administrators with detailed

graphical reports on the status of software being deployed and the licenses that are actually being used.

* Inventory Management - automatically collects detailed

software, hardware, and system information across heterogeneous platform environments.

* Application Management - provides packaging and automated

distribution, repair and uninstall capabilities across off-the-shelf and custom applications on computer systems.

* Content Distribution - allows enterprises to efficiently and

reliably deliver large volumes of rapidly changing server content across distributed locations.

* Remote Administration - provides IT administrators with the

ability to remotely control a system to help ensure quick problem diagnosis and resolution.

* OS Management - provides the ability to rapidly provision

and migrate operating systems.

"With Marimba Six, we continue to set the standard for policy-based management by helping companies continuously control their IT assets, while simultaneously enabling them to address urgent requirements such as security remediation and license compliance," said Rich Wyckoff, president and CEO of Marimba. "We believe Marimba Six will give customers the most efficient and effective change management solution to address the needs of their increasingly complex and distributed enterprises."

Pricing and Availability

Marimba Six is planned for release later in the fourth quarter of 2003. For additional information on all of Marimba's products, please contact Marimba sales via phone at 1-888-800-5444, or via email at orders@marimba.com.

About Marimba

Marimba, Inc. is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Marimba's Client Management, Server Management, and Embedded Management product families allow Global 2000 companies to better manage their IT resources, increase operational efficiency and reduce IT costs. Additional information is available at www.marimba.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the safe harbors created by these sections. These forward-looking statements include statements regarding: the functionality and benefits expected to be provided by Marimba Six and Marimba's products in general (including the ability of enterprises to have dynamic and continuous control over IT assets and resources, and reduce their total cost of ownership and improve quality of service; continual policy compliance enforcement; industry leading ease-of-deployment and reporting capabilities; and enhanced policy-based and on-demand management functionality); the demand for flexible management platforms that span desktops, servers and mobile devices; the extension of Marimba's technology leadership with the release of Marimba Six; and the planned release of Marimba Six later in the fourth quarter of 2003. Those results are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including: technical challenges customers may face in implementing and deploying Marimba's solution, which could limit the benefits expected to be provided by such products; the rapid pace of technological change and other development, marketing and sales challenges faced by Marimba, which could limit the ability of Marimba to make its new products generally available on schedule or with the functionality described; competition in the software change management market; general economic, technological and market conditions, which could affect the level of demand for change management software in general and Marimba's products in particular; and other development and technical challenges faced by Marimba and its customers. Actual results may differ materially due to these and other factors. All of the future product plans and releases described in this press release are at the sole discretion of Marimba and are subject to change and/or cancellation, and in no way should these future product plans or releases be viewed as commitments on Marimba's part. The matters discussed in this press release also involve risks and uncertainties described from time to time in Marimba's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In particular, see the Risk Factors described in Marimba's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, as submitted to the SEC and as may be updated or amended with future filings or submissions. Marimba undertakes no obligation to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained in this press release that may reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this press release.