BackWeb Awarded Patent For Polite Neighborcast Technology

Major Milestone Reached in Setting Standard Technology Requirements for ProactivePortal Content Delivery

SAN JOSE, Calif.— June 3, 2002 — BackWeb Technologies (Nasdaq: BWEB), the leading provider of ProactivePortal™ technologies for the enterprise, today announced that it has been granted a patent for its Distributed Client-Based Caching System, one of the foundations of its Polite Neighborcast® technology. First designed and introduced in 1997, the Polite Neighborcast technology is evidence of BackWeb's legacy and expertise in critical communications and scalable content delivery solutions.

The Polite Neighborcast technology optimizes a network by enabling clients to work in a peer-to-peer fashion. By allowing users to share data directly, the server's load is lightened and the overall system is more scalable. Clients are able to automatically locate their peers and share data, providing better performance and eliminatinng the need for additional hardware such as proxy servers.

"We continue to focus our R&D efforts on creating new products and enhancements to address the growing and changing needs of our customers," said Lior Hass, co-founder and chief architect of BackWeb Technologies. "The issuance of this patent is significant validation that BackWeb has overcome challenging technology barriers. Our Polite Neighborcast technology provides our customers with a critical communications system that allows for the seamless transfer of information."

The Polite Neighborcast technology is currently incorporated in the company's patented Polite® communications feature-set and allows companies to deliver large amounts of data to numerous PCs in a scalable, network-sensitive manner. The technology enhances BackWeb® Polite delivery technology by automatically transferring data among participating clients in a peer-to-peer fashion, thereby eliminating the need to retransmit the file from the server to the local area network (LAN) subnet. This provides users with three distinct advantages: network optimization, increased scalability and easier administration. BackWeb customers such as Cambridge Technology Partners, Cisco EMEA and Nortel Networks rely on this technology for scalable delivery of media-rich content for remote offices, thereby accelerating business velocity.

The BackWeb Polite Neighborcast technology, along with the complete Polite communications solution is available in the ProactivePortal Server v2 and is priced at $100 per user. Please call 800-863-0100 for more information about this product.