UH Communications ApS Announces Membership of Iona Technologies' OrbixWise Program and New CORBA Gateway Solution for Windows NT.

MONTREAL--Oct. 28, 1997--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Telemanagement World--UH Communications ApS (UHC) has today announced its decision to join IONA Technologies' (NASDAQ:IONAY) leading partner program OrbixWise(tm) as part of its drive towards delivery of CORBA-based solutions for global telecommunications carriers and equipment vendors. The UHC solution is designed for vendors building network management applications that conform with the industry standard known as the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN).

IONA, recently recognized by International Data Corp. (IDC) as the leading player in object middleware, supports the Object Management Group's (OMG) CORBA standard. UH Communications ApS (UHC) is a Danish company, known for its advanced TMN toolkit, Q3ADE(r) which builds TMN Agents/Mediation solutions and small/medium scale TMN management applications on Windows NT/95 and Solaris. UHC provides TMN solutions and tools for telecommunications carriers and equipment vendors.

"There is considerable momentum building behind Orbix(r) as the key facilitating technology behind the creation of CORBA/TMN gateways," commented Colin Newman, executive vice president of marketing at IONA Technologies. "Innovative organizations such as UH Communications are producing powerful products which will deliver the benefits of interoperability between CORBA and TMN to telecommunications vendors. The benefits of this interoperability are that companies can leverage their existing IT infrastructure and build fast, powerful innovative solutions around open standards."

UHC will deliver a gateway product that will enable CORBA based applications to flow information to and from devices based on the TMN standard by end of 1997.

Uffe Harksen, CEO and founder of UHC stated: "By using the leading tools, Orbix(r) and Q3ADE(r) on Windows NT, we are able to provide a scaleable and viable solution rapidly. The CORBA-CMIP Gateway is based on the Network Management Forum's (NMF) JIDM efforts to establish a standard set of C++ APIs for the TMN arena, based on CORBA. It can run stand-alone or be directly integrated into any Orbix(r) and Q3ADE(r)-based application offering direct CMIP and CORBA access to the application at the same time. We submitted the CORBA-CMIP Gateway for beta test in August 1997 and will release it at the end of 1997. UHC will also extend the gateway to provide access to SNMP through CORBA during the first quarter of 1998."

"UHC's approach, using Orbix for the CORBA gateway, can bring significant benefits to our telecoms customers who want to implement their systems around the TMN standard. The number of good solutions for Orbix/TMN interworking is growing daily, and the diversity of approaches that this brings means more flexibility and choice for our customers," commented Declan O'Sullivan, associate vice president of telecommunications development at IONA Technologies. The combination of CORBA and TMN (CMIP) provides solutions to problems in both worlds. On the TMN side, it provides standardized API's, seamless interworking with business applications and interworking solutions with the Java and Internet world. On the CORBA side it provides the object oriented query facilities of CMIP to handle very large numbers of object instances in an efficient way, and it opens a huge library of standardized object models for telecom equipment to the CORBA world.

More information on the Network Management Forum (NMF) is available on the Internet at: http://www.nmf.org . UH Communications ApS is a privately held company in Copenhagen/Denmark. UHC was founded in 1996 by people that since 1990 have been involved in several European TMN development projects.

UHC was founded with the mission to down-scale and simplify the use of TMN technology to extend its practical usability. UHC is one of the first companies in the world to manage to successfully market an advanced toolkit for developing cost competitive TMN solutions on Windows NT/95 and Sun Solaris platforms. UHC has also provided several mediation and management solutions on a consultancy basis.

IONA Technologies was founded in 1991 with the mission to enable businesses to integrate multiple, diverse software applications spanning the entire distributed enterprise. IONA's leading product, Orbix, allows organizations to build software components (or objects) with open, standard interfaces so that they can communicate with any other software conforming to the same standard. According to IDC's market research, Orbix, which is used by over 2,000 businesses worldwide, is the world's leading object middleware product. Orbix, conforms to the Object Management Group's CORBA specification. Earlier this year, IONA's Orbix won the prestigious Network Computing magazine Well-Connected Award as "Best Orb Middleware" and the company was chosen for an "Editors' Choice" award from Software magazine's Software 500 listing. Internet: http://www.iona.com - Information: [e-mail] -0-

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