IONA Names Proven Industry Executive to Lead Product Development Efforts; Stephanos Bacon Joins Company as Vice President, Product Development.

DUBLIN, Ireland & WALTHAM, Mass. -- IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, today announced that Stephanos Bacon has joined the company as Vice President, Product Development. In this role, Mr. Bacon brings more than two decades of software industry product development leadership to IONA. As Vice President, Product Development, Mr. Bacon will be responsible for leading all product development activities for Artix(TM), the company's extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and Orbix(R), its CORBA(R)-based integration technology.

Mr. Bacon's tenure in the software industry has been marked with a record of delivering innovative new products on time and with consistently high quality. He has held senior product engineering positions and managed distributed engineering teams with companies including Avaki Corporation, Broadvision, Object Design and Bachman Information Systems.

"Stephanos comes to IONA with a stellar record of proven leadership in product development management," stated Peter Zotto, president and COO, IONA. "His demonstrated ability to get the best out of his teams and deliver quality product on time is a perfect fit for IONA's heritage of technical excellence. We look forward to the positive contribution from Stephanos as IONA continues to deliver the right products, at the right time for our customers and prospects faced with complex integration challenges."

Prior to joining IONA, Mr. Bacon served as Vice President, Engineering for Avaki Corporation, a provider of Enterprise Information Integration products. While with Avaki, Mr. Bacon was most recently responsible for driving the product engineering, documentation and QA for the company's Avaki 6.0 product, which was delivered on time and to positive reviews from customers in the areas of quality, performance and usability.

"IONA represents an exciting next phase in my career and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to join a company with such a solid reputation of quality and innovation surrounding both its technology and engineering team," said Mr. Bacon. "Companies are faced daily with the need to solve complex integration challenges without sacrificing the performance and mission-critical nature of the systems they are trying to make work together. IONA helps companies meet that challenge. I look forward to lending my experience and expertise to an already impressive product development team."

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.