IONA TECHNOLOGIES BUNDLES CLOUDSCAPE JAVA DATABASE WITH IPORTAL APPLICATION SERVER.

Informix Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of Informix Corporation (Nasdaq:IFMX), has entered into a joint technology and marketing agreement with IONA, the leading e-business platform provider for Total Business Integration (Nasdaq:IONA).

The partnership calls for Informix Software's Cloudscape product to be bundled with IONA's iPortal Application Server.

IONA customers will benefit from a small footprint, 100% Pure Java certified standards database that can help them build platform independent, standards-based J2EE compliant applications. Using the Cloudscape database, developers can embed a robust and scalable database seamlessly into their unattended applications which will require zero administration. The Cloudscape database offers IONA customers rich database functionality including queries, secure data, recovery and transactions without the management overhead and complicated configuration associated with traditional databases. These capabilities are valuable to IONA's customers and evaluators when building or reconfiguring enterprise applications and legacy applications.

"IONA has an outstanding track record for delivering innovative technology," explains Ian Schmidt, vice president, Cloudscape Business Unit. "When combined with the Cloudscape database, the iPortal Application Server will ensure its users an easy-to-configure application development solution. Together, iPAS and the Cloudscape database will ensure users a high quality database platform for hassle-free application integration and a quicker time to market."

"IONA's iPortal Application Server is the foundation on which IONA's application integration and Web services offerings are built," said Patrick O'Brien, vice president of product planning and strategy at IONA. "In Informix's Cloudscape, we have found a database partner that matches our commitment to J2EE and other distributed computing standards, and supports our end-to-end business integration strategy."

Together, IONA's iPortal Application Server and Informix Software's Cloudscape database will provide developers with a much needed, end-to-end J2EE standards based solution. By combining a functionally complete EJB 1.1 application server and the Cloudscape high performance, scalable database; customers can develop applications simply and with no cost, until they deploy their application. Since the Cloudscape database is readily bundled with the iPortal Application Server, it can be seamlessly integrated to give IONA customers a true "out-of-the-box" solution to develop and test their applications; therefore reducing their time to market. In addition, the Cloudscape database uses industry standard APIs for ensuring consistency in application deployment and functionality across platforms and outside the corporate firewall. The Cloudscape database's all-Java technology provides IONA customers with an embeddable database engine as a part of their application server architecture that will "future-proof" their application for unknown future hardware platforms.