Tom Taulli is the author of "Investing in IPOs" (Bloomberg Personal Bookshelf). The book can be purchased at Amazon.com by clicking here. You can reach him at tom@taulli.com

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Two years ago, push technology was the buzz word that promised to revolutionize the Net. Instead of you searching for information, the information would come -- or be pushed -- to you.

PointCast and Marimba, each targeting different segments of users and employing different methods for delivering information, became the darlings of the push pack and perennial IPO candidates.

Well, users really did not warm to the push model, instead preferring portals and personalization. PointCast never went public and recently lost its high-profile CEO David Dorman to a start-up funded by AT&T and British Telecommunications. But Marimba is on the verge of an IPO and ready to prove that push has a pulse.

While individual users shunned push, Corporate America has embraced it as a way to solve the daunting problem of total cost of ownership. TOC includes not only the cost to purchase hardware and software, but also, most important, the costs associated with integrating that technology with legacy systems and the users' training necessary to work with the solution. The Internet is seen as way to drastically reduce TOC. And that is good news for Marimba since it offers a software product that will let IS manager push software upgrades and patches to every desktop in the organization from central services via the Net. Previously, if your company had 10,000 employees scattered across the world and you wanted to upgrade particular a software package, you would have to send out CD-ROMs to every branch office, install the software, integrate everything, and show employees how it works.

Propelled by its Castanet technology, Marimba has been able to attract an impressive list of corporate users including Bear Stearns, Charles Schwab, EarthLink, Home Depot, Intuit, and Ingram. Marimba has more than 200 customers. With such momentum, Marimba has filed to go public. Its all-star roster of underwriters includes Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Credit Suisse First Boston, BT Alex. Brown, and Hambrecht & Quist. The proposed ticker symbol is MRBA. And yes, Marimba has the typical income statement of an Internet company -- $14.6 million in accumulated deficit. However, the company has shown impressive sales growth with 1998 revenue of $17.1 million, up from $5.6 million in 1997.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer also has an incredible management team. Kim Polese, a co-founder and CEO, helped create the Java computer language while at Sun Microsystems. Marimba's chief technology officer is Arthur Van Hoff, who co-founded the company with Polese. Van Hoff was also at Sun and instrumental in creating Java.

Still, there are many risk factors. There is a legal cloud hanging over Marimba. Novadigm filed a suit against Marimba in March 1997 alleging Marimba's Castanet product line is in violation of patents held by the Mahwah, N.J., company. Marimba believes it has valid defenses in the pending case. Then again, intellectual-property cases are complex and can have unexpected outcomes.

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Marimba is it is a one-product company. To reach profitability, Marimba will likely have to expand its product line. On the upside, Marimba was funded by the legendary venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has been involved in the wildly successful IPOs for Intuit, Netscape, Sun, and Amazon.com. With such backing, a hot IPO market, and corporations struggling with massive TOC issues, Marimba will likely push its way to the top of the IPO charts.

For comments/questions, contact Tom Taulli at ttaulli@bpia.com.

Commercial: Readers interested in IPOs may want to check out The Investor's Guide To New Issues: How To Profit From Initial Public Offerings, available in our bookstore.