Marimba's Polese: Not Just Another Silicon Valley Girl

By some accounts, Kim Polese is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a poster child these days; entrepreneurial and diligent in her approach to market opportunities, this technology company executive is a lightning rod for Internet banking and commerce, thanks in large measure to the "push" she's giving the financial services industry.

That push comes in the form of Internet technology that enables financial institutions to send customized, quality information and applications out to their customers (see cover story, p. 50). And while most bank and nonbank players refuse to talk on the record about push technology, privately they concede that a good many examples of intranet, extranet and Internet applications abound, from extremely cost-efficient, secure corporate and institutional banking applications to emerging retail banking ones. And, they say, the momentum of push is really just getting started.

Good news for a young CEO. Indeed, Kim Polese's life is the stuff great Silicon Valley legends are made of; today, at 35 years old, Polese is founder and CEO of Marimba, Inc., an increasingly well-regarded push technology company that she and three other ex-Sun employees started with $60,000 (each of the company's four founders kicked in $15,000).

But Polese didn't exactly come from meager technology beginnings. Prior to founding Marimba, Polese was a product marketing manager at Sun Microsystems. It was there at Sun where she began her meteoric rise. Popular lore has it that Polese and her team masterminded the name "Java," a nonsensical, now all-too-famous label for Sun's platform-independent programming language (see Between the Lines, p. 15, for the low-down on Polese's Java days and naming ways).

Since those days, Polese has come to be known in SV circles as much for her off-beat, peculiar branding habits as for what the products themselves signify to the marketplace. At Marimba, the company's push technology product is called Castanet, and while no one knows what the name means, the benefits of the product are catching on like wildfire-and then some.

But Marimba's much-anticipated success is more the outcome of Polese's sheer determination and hustle in getting financial services companies interested in what push technology can do for their organizations than mere Silicon Valley myth. A number of the industry's most aggressive financial institutions are already developing push technology applications. Many other institutions are in the process of gathering intelligence about the company-Marimba, these players say, is on their "radar screen"-and the business merits of push technology.

While Marimba isn't alone in its quest to capture the lion's share of the market-PointCast, among others, is just as eager-the company's product could give banks just the right push they're looking for.

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