IONA Introduces the Next Generation of Extensible ESB with Artix 3.0.

DUBLIN, Ireland & WALTHAM, Mass. -- Artix 3.0 Enhancements Address Requirements of the Most Complex Integration and Interoperability Challenges Facing Enterprise IT

IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, today announced availability of Artix(TM) version 3.0, the company's extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The upgrades included in Artix 3.0 are designed to strengthen the product's proven set of enterprise features and functionality including extensibility, platform support and enterprise qualities of service. These improvements expand the range of systems and technologies that Artix users can service-enable and leverage in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives.

Artix 3.0 is intended for organizations with the most demanding enterprise integration challenges. These organizations are faced with evolving business requirements that demand highly flexible and agile enterprise systems. These organizations typically prefer to preserve, and where possible add value to, a large and complex inventory of systems. The mission-critical nature of the systems these organizations must deploy requires significant performance levels, as well as enterprise-levels of security, management, availability and transaction services.

"Artix offers us a means to deliver seamless, non-invasive Web service enablement of our products to best meet our customers' evolving requirements. Because of Artix's extensibility, we are confident in our ability to support any standards we face in a deployment environment, and do so with minimal code change to the original software," said Graham Francis, Network Intelligence Product Manager, Marconi. "The upgrades we've seen as participants in the Artix 3.0 beta program offer even greater capabilities for companies like Marconi to address the complexities and performance demands of mission critical systems."

"Demanding business and IT needs are driving leading companies to increasingly adopt integration technology providing enterprise-class quality of service and wide platform support with little concern about the complexity of the existing IT environment," explained Massimo Pezzini, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Inc . "The next generation of ESBs will provide IT organizations with a standards-based, highly flexible and adaptive technology on which business critical, services-based applications can be comfortably built and deployed."

New features in Artix 3.0 include:

--Enhanced Extensibility Characteristics. Unlike other ESBs that constrain integration projects to single or limited transports and payloads, Artix service-enables existing systems by extending their endpoints with targeted plug-ins. Artix plug-ins can support virtually any protocol, transport, data model, security standard, and development platform. Artix 3.0 enhances this extensibility through the addition of hot deployment capabilities, which allow new plug-ins to be seamlessly deployed in live systems without unnecessary downtime of mission-critical applications.

--Broader Platform Coverage. Artix 3.0 extends its platform coverage to include the popular Eclipse and Visual Studio development platforms. Tight Artix integration with these IDEs lets developers use familiar tools and established skills to build enterprise SOAs. Artix 3.0 also includes expanded application platform support for J2EE, POJO and Java servlets, and native C++ containers. Enhanced support for Microsoft(R) .NET addresses the growing use of this technology framework for new development projects. For organizations with significant mainframe investments, Artix 3.0 makes it more convenient to bring these resources into modern computing environments through features such as WSDL-first development for PL/1 and COBOL, WSDL generation from BMS screen mapsets and enhanced tooling to support WSDL-first command line utilities.

--Improved Enterprise Qualities of Service (QoS) in the areas of security, high availability, management, transaction support and directory services. IONA's heritage in the telecommunications and financial services industry has shown the importance of enterprise QoS to support mission-critical systems. New enterprise QoS features in Artix 3.0 include X509 certification authentication, active/active client fail over, integration with Tivoli and CA-WSDM, 2PC transaction support, WS-Atomic Transaction support, and UDDI support.

"IONA has a proud tradition of helping some of the world's largest companies solve some of history's most challenging integration and interoperability problems. We are continuing that tradition with the introduction of Artix 3.0," said Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA. "Through the enhancements to its extensibility, broad platform support and enterprise qualities of service, Artix 3.0 gives CIOs the confidence to initiate projects that will have a positive impact on the bottom line and gives IT departments an extensible ESB that meets their technology needs now and into the future."

Pricing and Availability

Artix 3.0 will be generally available by the end of Q1 2005. A typical Artix 3.0 deployment begins at $10,000 per CPU.

About IONA

For more than a decade, IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) has been a world leader in delivering high-performance integration solutions for enterprise 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. Customers use Artix to incorporate current IT assets into valuable new business applications through enterprise-class, standards-based connectivity.

With its partners, IONA can deliver NOW on the promise of service-oriented integration, making it possible for customers to achieve system longevity and agility at a significantly lower cost.

IONA's customers include Global 2000 companies in telecommunications, financial services, aerospace and manufacturing, including AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, NTT, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Winterthur Insurance, Zurich Insurance and Boeing.

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.