IONA Delivers New E-Business Infrastructure With Orbix 2000; 2,500 Beta Customers Test the Foundation of the iPortal Suite.

Business/Technology Editors

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 13, 2000

IONA Technologies, the Enterprise Portal Company, today announced the general availability of Orbix 2000, a new generation of e-business middleware designed for developing, integrating, deploying and managing enterprise portals and other distributed applications. Orbix 2000 is the foundation for the iPortal Suite. The product has been in beta for more than six months, where it has been tested by more than 2,500 customers.

Like the other elements in the iPortal Suite, Orbix 2000 is built on IONA's patent-pending Adaptive Runtime Technology(TM) to deliver ease-of-use, flexibility and scalability to development efforts. Adaptive Runtime Technology is a plug-in framework that allows developers to add standard CORBA services and custom code at runtime. These plug-ins can be changed without modifying or recompiling code, helping developers introduce new product features quickly and easily. And because Orbix 2000's micro-kernel architecture isolates only the services needed by an application, it provides unprecedented or "Xtreme Scalability(TM)" at runtime.

"Orbix 2000 has been redesigned and engineered from the ground up to leverage the expertise we've garnered from more than 4,000 Orbix customers over the last nine years," said Dr. Michael Waclawiczek, product director for Orbix 2000 at IONA Technologies. "The distributed computing capabilities of Orbix 2000 and the other elements of the iPortal Suite provide a true enterprise B2B platform for our customers."

Orbix 2000 Offers Customers:

--   Xtreme Scalability(TM) - Orbix 2000's revolutionary architecture
     and Portable Object Adapter (POA) supports billions of objects
     and provides linear scalability in terms of connections, servers
     and users.

--   Flexibility and interoperability - Orbix 2000 fully adheres to
     CORBA 2.3 standards and supports several CORBA 3 features,
     including asynchronous messaging. Orbix 2000 provides
     interoperability with Orbix 3.x products and other CORBA
     compliant ORBs.

--   Reliability and manageability - Orbix 2000 provides large-scale
     deployment features such as naming-based load balancing,
     transparent object migration and active connection management.

--   High development productivity - Orbix 2000's Integrated Code
     Generation Toolkit simplifies the process of developing C++
     applications.

--   Comprehensive support - Orbix 2000 features CORBA services such
     as Naming, Persistent State Service (PSS), SSL and single
     resource OTS.

Pricing and Availability:

Orbix 2000 1.0 is available immediately. Windows and Linux developer licenses are available for US$4,495 and Unix developer licenses are available for US$7,495. Runtime licenses start at US$8,000 for four CPUs. Training and consulting services are available to help customers of previous Orbix versions migrate to Orbix 2000. Orbix 2000 1.0 supports C++. Java support is forthcoming and a beta version will be available at IONA World on April 3, 2000.

About the iPortal Suite:

Announced in the Fall of 1999, IONA's iPortal Suite helps companies build enterprise portals, which are unified points of access that connect the web to the corporate business by integrating all of an organization's applications and back-end systems. The iPortal Suite consists of five components:

-    iPortal Server, which provides Internet integration in the form
     of a portal access and control platform

-    iPortal Integration Server, which is a standards-based
     environment for leveraging and integrating large-scale enterprise
     applications

-    iPortal OS/390 Server, which incorporates mainframe applications
     into e-business solutions, delivering proven business systems to
     enterprise portals

-    iPortal Application Server, which is an EJB/J2EE-based server for
     component-based business logic

-    Orbix 2000, which is a standards-based, common e-business
     infrastructure that is the foundation of the iPortal Suite

About IONA Technologies:

IONA Technologies, the Enterprise Portal Company, is a leading provider of e-business infrastructure that helps organizations build and deploy enterprise portals, Internet commerce sites, and other large-scale distributed applications. IONA supports the full diversity of languages -including Java and C++ - and distributed computing technologies including XML, Enterprise JavaBeans, CORBA, Microsoft's Windows DNA 2000 and IBM OS/390, CICS and IMS - used by today's development organizations. Founded in 1991, IONA Technologies is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company had revenues of $105 million in 1999 and employs more than 650 people in 25 offices worldwide. For more information, please see www.iona.com.

IONA and Orbix are registered trademarks of IONA Technologies. CORBA is a trademark or registered trademarks of the Object Management Group, Inc in the U.S. and other countries. Enterprise Java Beans and Java are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems. The Enterprise Portal Company, IONA iPortal Integration Server, IONA iPortal Server, IONA iPortal Application Server, Orbix 2000 and Adaptive Runtime Technology (ART) are trademarks of IONA Technologies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.