Correcting and Replacing Previous IONA Announcement.

ZURICH, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 5, 1998--COMDEX Internet and Object World Frankfurt

Swisscom Application Awarded First Prize at

COMDEX Internet and Object World Frankfurt.

Object Engineering GmbH have used IONA Technologies' (NASDAQ:IONAY) Orbix(r) as the core technology to integrate the different computer systems at Swisscom, Switzerland's telecommunications company. The application, which recently won an award at COMDEX Internet and Object World Frankfurt, provides Swisscom with a single and manageable solution to improving the management of connection data and inventory data for telephone and service subscribers.

Swisscom's existing systems were the result of over fifteen years of development and redesign in responding to new customer and business requirements. The resulting system was thus complex, lacked scalability and was difficult to maintain and manage. To solve these problems, Swisscom recognised the need to develop a complete solution that linked client applications running on PCs with the heterogeneous host and server side technology.

After extensively evaluating various alternatives to overcoming the problem, Swisscom decided to adopt CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) as the infrastructure for migrating their systems into one new interoperable solution. Swisscom chose the world's leading CORBA product, Orbix(r), which has been developed to enable organisations make software work together

"We were faced with a situation where to meet the continually changing needs of our business we had to bring our existing applications together into one system which would also enable us to add new technology when required," commented Bernhard Picenoni, systems engineer at Swisscom. "After looking at various approaches, we chose Orbix, because it was a mature, proven product that offered us wide platform coverage and offered our developers tight COM/CORBA integration which enabled us to tie our desktops more effectively to our back end servers."

"The Swisscom project posed a real challenge in making a large number of different systems and platforms work together," commented Andres Koch, president of Object Engineering GmbH. "Orbix provided us with the necessary infrastructure that enabled us to tie these systems into one coherent solution which will also allow easy integration of future technologies at Swisscom."

"Choosing a technology that offered the richest environment for integrating systems at Swisscom was critical," commented Colin Newman, executive vice president of marketing at IONA Technologies. "Orbix provided the scaleable infrastructure to enable Swisscom to design and deploy a complete application that incorporates the benefits of the existing systems with the advantages of modern technology."

Swisscom is the national network operator for switched voice, mobile and data communications in Switzerland. Operating with a staff of approximately 21,000 and with a total turnover of CHF10.5 billion, Swisscom focuses on customer segments with high communications yields such as banks, insurance companies, industrial conglomerates and public authorities. Swisscom's experience as an international network operator has been further strengthened by a series of cross border alliances and joint ventures. Internet: http://www.swisscom.com

Object Engineering GmbH, Uitikon/Zurich, Switzerland was founded by Andres Koch in April 1995 for the purpose of supporting object-oriented technology in projects. It consolidates more than 15 years of experience in distributed and object-oriented computing on various platforms. Object Engineering GmbH specialises in providing distributed systems and, in particular, providing integration and migration solutions for legacy applications. It focuses mainly on CORBA in, amongst others, the telecommunications industry. Internet: http://www.objeng.ch

Founded in 1991, IONA Technologies (NASDAQ:IONAY) is in the business of making software work together. IONA's leading product, Orbix(r), provides customers with a standards based enterprise middleware solution to make diverse software components work together in a reliable, dependable and scaleable manner. According to IDC's market research, Orbix, which is used by over 3,000 businesses worldwide and conforms to the Object Management Group's CORBA specification, is the world's leading object middleware product. In 1997, IONA's Orbix won the prestigious Network Computing magazine Well-Connected Award as "Best Orb Middleware" and the company was chosen for an "Editors' Choice" award from Software magazine's Software 500 listing. -0-

NOTE TO EDITORS: To access IONA press releases and background material on the web, visit: http://www.iona.com/Press/. If you would like to receive IONA press releases by e-mail, contact Tom Murphy at [e-mail]

Orbix is a registered trademark of IONA Technologies. Making software work together is a trademark of IONA Technologies. Object Engineering(r) is a registered trademark of Object Engineering GmbH. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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