BackWeb Announces Alliances with Mentergy and Docent to Enable Polite Push-Based Delivery of E-Learning Content

New Reseller and Marketing Relationships to Bring BackWeb's Push Infrastructure to Corporate Learning Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif. — December 4, 2000 — BackWeb® Technologies (Nasdaq: BWEB), a leading provider of push communications infrastructure for e-business, today announced alliances with Mentergy, Inc. (a Gilat Communications, Ltd. e-learning company – Nasdaq:GICOF) and Docent, Inc. (Nasdaq: DCNT) that will bring BackWeb's patented Polite™ push infrastructure to corporate e-learning environments. Through its value-added reseller and joint marketing relationships with Mentergy and Docent, BackWeb will explore ways to enhance delivery of Mentergy e-learning content on Docent's platform. The companies also will jointly pursue strategic customer opportunities where the need for both e-learning solutions and a push communications infrastructure create a single-source advantage.

The new relationships align BackWeb with two leaders in the e-learning and corporate training market. According to Simba Information Inc. and The Gartner Group, half of the $10.4 billion corporate training market will be devoted to technology-based training in 2001.

"BackWeb is delighted to work closely with Mentergy and Docent to explore new opportunities for Polite delivery of e-learning content to meet the growing demand for next-generation, Web-based training solutions," said Erez Lorber, vice president of business development at BackWeb Technologies. "These alliances also add strategic value to BackWeb's offerings by making Mentergy and Docent solutions and services available to our Global 2000 customer base."

BackWeb and Mentergy to Pursue Strategic Opportunities
Mentergy offers clients a blended e-learning suite of products and services, including live e-learning, video-rich broadband delivery, custom courseware development, step-by-step consulting, and an integrated suite of e-learning development and delivery tools. BackWeb's Polite push infrastructure will allow Mentergy customers to efficiently send learning content of any type over any network. Using BackWeb, companies can transfer even large files with no effect on network performance. BackWeb's closed-loop architecture also allows companies to track not only how knowledge is received, but also how well it is retained.

"BackWeb and Mentergy both are dedicated to enhancing corporate performance, and this new alliance carries that agenda forward in a way that will deliver bottom-line benefits to Global 2000 companies," said Ron Zamir, vice president of marketing at Mentergy. "As the leading provider of blended e-learning solutions, Mentergy understands the need to offer a variety of learning acquisition channels. Our partnership with BackWeb will bring our respective e-learning strengths to our collective customer base of Fortune 1000 customers."

"The BackWeb push communications infrastructure is ideally designed to deliver content of any size or format, which makes it especially attractive for many Mentergy clients," said Israel Kaufman, chief technology officer at Gilat, Mentergy's parent company.

BackWeb and Docent to Jointly Market Solutions
Docent provides e-learning infrastructure products and services that enable the exchange of knowledge among large enterprises, educational content providers and professional communities. Through its cooperative marketing relationship with Docent, BackWeb will make Docent Enterprise software available to BackWeb customers, and BackWeb push infrastructure software will be offered to Docent customers.

"BackWeb is a natural and powerful compliment to Docent Enterprise e-learning solutions," said Kathleen Gogan, vice president of marketing at Docent. "BackWeb solves the network bandwidth puzzle through its Polite push architecture, and offers our customers a significantly better way to send information that supplements the users learning experience."

BackWeb's Polite push technology transmits information only when network bandwidth is available, so users can receive content in the background and with no effect on performance of other e-learning activities such as browsing the catalogue, taking a course or attending a seminar. BackWeb delivers digital packages of any size or format, including audio, video, graphics and html.

About Mentergy
Mentergy, Inc. is a Gilat Communications, Ltd. (NASDAQ:GICOF) enterprise e-learning company that provides a comprehensive set of products and services, including large enterprise implementation, consulting, courseware development, and e-learning authoring and planning software suites. With over 21 years of expertise in the learning industry,

Mentergy addresses the growing industry demand for a learning company to help U.S. and Canadian organizations make a cost-effective shift from traditional learning, with its inherent expense and loss of productivity, to a blended approach, which includes technology- based training solutions or e-learning. Mentergy's customers range from midsize companies to Global 2000, including Aetna US Healthcare, WorldCom, Made2Manage, Citibank, Countrywide, Rockwell-Collins, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Intel and other industry leaders. For more information, visit http://www.mentergy.com.

About Docent, Inc.
Docent, Inc. (Nasdaq: DCNT) provides eLearning infrastructure products and services that enable the exchange of knowledge among large enterprises, educational content providers and professional communities. Docent™ Enterprise, an Internet-based software platform for knowledge exchange, goes beyond the delivery of learning content online, commonly known as eLearning, to bring together organizations into an electronic marketplace. In addition to being recognized for standing out amongst the competition by PC Week, it was named "Best Integrated Online Learning System" by brandon-hall.com and was amongst several products recognized by Call Center Solutions Magazine as "1999 Product(s) of the Year." Docent, Inc. is headquartered in Mountain View, California and has offices throughout the US and Europe. For more information about Docent, visit www.docent.com or call +1 650 934-9500.

About BackWeb Technologies
BackWeb Technologies is a leading offline Web software company. BackWeb extends the value of technology investments by offering mobile and remote employees offline access to portals, intranets and other Web-based applications and content. The company's products reduce network costs and improve the productivity of an increasingly mobile workforce. At the core of BackWeb's products is its patented Polite® synchronization technology that can distribute large amounts of data even over narrow bandwidth connections. BackWeb® customers include market leaders such as Boehringer Ingelheim, Centocor, Eastman Kodak, GE Healthcare, Guidant, HP, KLA Tencor, Lam Research, Pfizer and more than one hundred other companies. BackWeb also has strategic reseller alliances with software industry leaders: Plumtree, SAP and IBM. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. and Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel. For more information, visit www.backweb.com or call (800) 863-0100.

Statements in this news release, which are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Securities laws, including statements of beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Examples of these statements include, but are not limited to, the ability of BackWeb software to allow customers to gain mobile, disconnected use of their portals and help increase field sales and field service productivity, the integration of BackWeb software with BEA products will help developers extend portal applications for offline use without changing the way they work, and the ability of the resulting applications to help field sales and service organizations realize maximum productivity, cost savings, and process acceleration gains while disconnected from the network. Actual results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include unforeseen technological issues related to use of the BackWeb software, deployment issues related to implementation, unforeseen software errors, competitive factors and business and expense factors that may affect the perceived efficiencies from use of BackWeb's products, and the risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in BackWeb's periodic reports and registration statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. BackWeb assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release.