IONA Hosts Industry Leaders at CORBA Customer Council; Companies Representing Multiple Industry Sectors to Discuss Leveraging CORBA and New Technologies for Next Generation Service-Oriented Architectures.

DUBLIN, Ireland & WALTHAM, Mass. -- IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, will host a delegation of industry leading enterprise customers at the company's corporate headquarters in Dublin this week. IONA's CORBA(R) Customer Council will bring together members of its customer base for a two-day meeting to discuss their Orbix(R) deployments and ongoing enterprise computing strategies with members of IONA's senior management team, engineering, product marketing and services organizations. Participating companies include Motorola, Credit Suisse, Zurich Insurance, IDS Scheer, NEC, Lufthansa Systems, Corrigent, NS Solutions Corporation, and Winterthur Insurance.

IONA's CORBA Customer Council is intended to provide a venue for the exchange of industry experiences and best practices for customers that wish to both maintain and extend their Orbix investments to support next generation Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). IONA's enterprise customers have made significant investments in the IT infrastructure and middleware that runs many of their most mission critical systems, and CORBA is a strategic and vital element within those IT environments. Additionally, the Customer Council provides an opportunity for customers to hear from their peers and from IONA technology leaders how they can extend their CORBA deployments using Artix(TM), IONA's Extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

"IONA is committed to helping its customers further develop and extend their CORBA investments and drive new value from existing systems," said Peter Zotto, CEO, IONA Technologies. "IONA is at the forefront of the CORBA standard with world class products that support mission-critical business applications for market leading enterprise customers. These customers have been deploying Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for more than a decade with CORBA. Driving new value from those systems and extending their SOA infrastructure with next generation solutions, such as Artix, is critical for meeting rapidly changing business requirements in highly competitive market sectors."

The CORBA standard is broadly considered to be a precursor of SOA and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies. "The same architectural principles that underpin CORBA are core to today's SOA infrastructure solutions," said Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG). "That explains CORBA's vitality and maturity, and why it continues to win converts. Indeed, much can be learned from the experiences of the CORBA community to support enterprise organizations that are embarking on SOA for the first time."

The CORBA Customer Council follows the recent announcement of the launch of orbzone.org, an online, vendor-independent portal dedicated to bringing together the worldwide community of CORBA architects and developers and sponsored by IONA. Members of the CORBA community and those enterprise organisations considering an SOA project can access industry viewpoints, CORBA news and expert papers at www.orbzone.org.

About IONA

For more than a decade, IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) has been a world leader in delivering high-performance integration solutions for Global 2000 IT environments. IONA pioneered standards-based integration with its CORBA-based Orbix(R) products. Artix(TM), IONA's extensible Enterprise Service Bus, enables existing enterprise systems to be integrated with an organization's common infrastructure components. IONA's sponsorship of the ObjectWeb Celtix open source ESB is a natural extension of the company's history of solving integration problems by leveraging open standards and distributed architectures.

IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts and offices worldwide. For additional information about IONA, visit our Web site at http://www.iona.com.

IONA, IONA Technologies, the IONA logo, Orbix, High Performance Integration, Artix, Mobile Orchestrator and Making Software Work Together are trademarks or registered trademarks of IONA Technologies PLC and/or its subsidiaries. CORBA is a trademark or registered trademark of the Object Management Group, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks that may appear herein are the property of their respective owners.