ObjectWeb Celtix Project Achieves Key Milestone; Community Delivers First Binary for Celtix Open Source ESB.

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 open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) project has achieved its first key milestone. Milestone 1 makes available to the Celtix community the first end-to-end running subset of Celtix functionality in a tested binary format.

Upon its initial release, ObjectWeb Celtix will deliver a Java Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) runtime and set of extensibility APIs, simplifying the construction, integration and flexible reuse of technical and business components using a standards-based, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). The first Celtix milestone offers the community an important baseline that can be built upon and includes support for delivering SOAP messages over HTTP, preliminary work on transport and binding APIs, initial implementations of SOAP 1.1 and HTTP 1.1, and Java(TM)-to-WSDL and WSDL-to-Java tools. Celtix Milestone releases are anticipated twice per quarter, with future Milestones including support for JBI, JMS, and the WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-Addressing specifications.

"Achieving the Milestone 1 release represents an important stage in the Celtix lifecycle," explained Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA. "Milestone 1 defines the extensible Celtix architecture which is designed around plug-ins. This type of architecture is ideal for open source projects and helps to establish a solid foundation on which the Celtix community can grow and add new participants. Greater involvement in the community is one of the best ways to ensure that Celtix truly meets the needs of customers using ESB technology to support SOA initiatives."

"Thanks to IONA's commitment, ObjectWeb Celtix is quickly becoming a leading open source project for service oriented architectures (SOA). The availability of Milestone 1 is the demonstration of the project's vitality," said Jean-Pierre Laisne, ObjectWeb Chairman and Linux & Open-Source Strategy Manager for Bull. "We are confident that ObjectWeb's enterprise service bus initiative (ESBi) in general and the Celtix project in particular will succeed in federating a strong community of corporate contributors, so as to deliver open source integration solutions to the mainstream in a sustainable manner."

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.