WASHINGTON, DC, July 30, 2001 – Bantu, Inc. today announced that Science Applications International Corporation's (SAIC) Strategies Group has signed a license agreement to become an authorized reseller of the Bantu Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence Platform. Under the terms of agreement, SAIC's Strategies Group can sell the Bantu product to its government client base, and also will use the secure IM product for the Group's 500-person staff.

SAIC and Bantu have been running an IM pilot for a Department of Defense agency client of the SAIC Strategies Group.

"The SAIC users involved in the pilot relied on the Bantu IM platform for daily team communications, and we saw that those productivity benefits would be useful to our entire organization," said Michael Pritz, program manager of SAIC's Strategies Group.

Bantu features patent-pending, end-to-end message encryption and, through its recent partnership with VeriSign, the first digital certificate-based IM solution for business. Bantu's Web-based client also works across multiple platforms, including PC, Macintosh, Linux, Unix and WAP-enabled wireless devices.

"Our relationship with SAIC has been win-win from the very beginning," said Larry Schlang, President and CEO of Bantu. "SAIC's need to have secure IM that is available to globally dispersed users on multiple platforms, has made Bantu's IM & Presence Platform a natural fit."

About SAIC Strategies Group: SAIC Strategies Group has been providing government, commercial and international clients with integrated solutions to pressing and complex problems for more than two decades. It provides strategic consulting services in three key areas: Policy Analysis, Operations and System Analysis and Strategic Integration. Group staff members assist clients with program management, communications, systems integration, and logistical support and by electronic decision analysis, group problem solving and collaboration, legislative analysis, modeling and simulation, and wargaming to increase understanding of critical global issues.

About SAIC: SAIC is the nation's largest employee-owned research and engineering company, providing information technology, systems integration and eBusiness products and services to commercial and government customers. SAIC engineers and scientists work to solve complex technical problems in telecommunications, national security, health care, transportation, energy, the environment and financial services. With annual revenues of $5.9 billion, SAIC and its subsidiaries, including Telcordia Technologies, have more than 41,000 employees at offices in more than 150 cities worldwide. More information about SAIC can be found on the Internet at www.saic.com.

About Bantu, Inc.: \ban' too\ 1 : Ancient root language of the African people 2 : Leading provider of secure, business-grade Instant Messaging and Presence solutions to enterprises, application providers and communications companies. Adaptable to a broad spectrum of business needs, Bantu integrates device-independent, real-time communication capabilities into any application or service. Bantu is based in Washington, D.C. Its customers and partners include Citrix, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA), Corechange, Johns Hopkins University, SAIC, Sprint, SRA/Assentor and VeriSign.

Statements in this announcement other than historical data and information constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause our actual results, performance, achievements or industry results to be very different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Some of these factors include, but are not limited to, the risk factors set forth in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended January 31, 2001, and such other filings that the Company makes with the SEC from time to time. Due to such uncertainties and risks, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.