ObjectWeb Celtix Project Achieves Third Key Milestone; Full JMS Transport Support and Multiple Licensing Strategy Mark Latest Accomplishments.

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 third key milestone.

The on-schedule delivery of Celtix Milestone 3 provides the community with additional transport support, broader specification compliance and significantly enhanced usability. Additionally, a multiple licensing approach that supports both LGPL and EPL creates greater opportunities for open source communities such as the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and others to take dependencies on Celtix code for their ESB runtime functionality as part of ongoing open source projects.

"With the delivery of Milestone 3, the Celtix project compares favourably with available commercial ESBs," explained Carl Trieloff, director, Open Source Programs, IONA. "The Celtix community has delivered robust JMS support and this, combined with the other features made available in Milestone 3, gives end users a powerful, and cost-effective, ESB to support their Service Oriented Architecture and other integration projects."

Milestone 3 also includes the completed implementation of HTTP 1.1 and Servlet Transport support, incorporation of SOAP 1.1 headers and additional support for WS-Addressing and JAX-WS. In the area of Celtix usability, command line tools for WSDL-to-Java and Java-to-WSDL have been added and the Celtix configuration infrastructure is complete. Please see http://celtix.objectweb.org for additional details.

"This Celtix milestone is a significant step towards providing an industry-grade set of ESB components at ObjectWeb," said Christophe Ney, Executive Director of the ObjectWeb Consortium. "The innovative LGPL/EPL licensing model of this project should help foster reuse of Celtix by a number of players in this domain."

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 Service Oriented Architecture (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.