ObjectWeb Celtix Project Achieves Fourth Key Milestone; Celtix Community Delivers Important Integration and Interoperability Capabilities.

DUBLIN, Ireland, WALTHAM, Mass. & GRENOBLE, France -- IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, and ObjectWeb, a well established and respected open source community with a focus on the development of industry-grade distributed middleware, today announced that the Celtix(TM) open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) project has achieved its fourth key milestone.

The on-schedule delivery of Celtix Milestone 4 provides the community with powerful new integration and interoperability capabilities made available via the Maven 2.0 build and integration system and the support of dynamic API's. The use of Maven, when combined with the multiple licensing approach introduced in Milestone 3, makes it easier for open source communities to take dependencies and build from Celtix source code for their respective projects. The dynamic API eases integration of Celtix with other pieces of required Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure, either open source or commercial, such as BPEL and transformation engines or any other technical services.

"The new functionality and build system in Milestone 4 makes it easier for the community of projects that rely on the Celtix runtime to consume Celtix source code and supports the use of Celtix in real-world SOA deployments," explained Carl Trieloff, director, Open Source Programs, IONA. "With Milestone 4, the Celtix community continues to add important feature sets that rival features available in commercial ESBs."

Milestone 4 also includes enhancements to the command line tools that streamline the service creation process. Policy-based configuration, plus interoperability improvements to both JMS and HTTP transport support have also been delivered. Please see http://celtix.objectweb.org for additional details.

"Celtix is a key project in the ObjectWeb ESB initiative and exemplary by its development pace and breadth of functionality," said Jean-Pierre Laisne, ObjectWeb Chairman and Linux & Open-Source Strategy Manager for Bull. "The development team pays special attention to making the software reusable by other projects while at the same time preventing duplication of efforts, which is exactly what open source is all about."

The goal of the Celtix project is to provide an open source, Java ESB runtime that can simplify the construction, integration and flexible reuse of technical and business components using a standards-based SOA. For more information about ObjectWeb Celtix, or to become involved in the Celtix community, please visit http://celtix.objectweb.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.

About ObjectWeb

Founded in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA, ObjectWeb is a consortium of leading companies and research organizations from around the world who have joined forces to produce next generation of Open Source Middleware. ObjectWeb's goal is to provide Real-Time Enterprises with independent solutions that combine quality and robustness at the best possible performance/cost ratio.

ObjectWeb targets alternative solutions to proprietary products for e-business, business integration, data connectivity, grid computing, and enterprise messaging. Based on Open Standards, ObjectWeb's middleware includes application servers, components, frameworks and tools. Examples of ObjectWeb's "cost killer" middleware are JOnAS - an Open Source certified implementation of the J2EE(tm) specification, JORAM - a Message Oriented Middleware and Enhydra - a Java(tm)/XML Application Server.

http://www.objectweb.org

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. Java, J2EE, and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks that may appear herein are the property of their respective owners.