IONA JOINS ECLIPSE FOUNDATION AS STRATEGIC DEVELOPER TO
LEAD PROPOSED SOA TOOLING PLATFORM TOP-LEVEL PROJECT

DUBLIN, Ireland & WALTHAM, Mass & OTTAWA, Ontario, Canada – September 12, 2005 - IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, and the Eclipse Foundation, a community committed to the implementation of a universal platform for tools integration, today announced that IONA has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer. In this role, IONA is bringing to bear more than a decade’s worth of integration experience to lead a proposed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Tools Platform (STP) project.

IONA joins the nine existing Strategic Developers; Actuate, BEA, Borland, Computer Associates, IBM, Intel, Scapa, Sybase and Wind River as a Board Member for the Eclipse Community. The STP project proposal is intended to provide an integrated developer tooling platform for SOA-based infrastructure, creating the foundation for an extensible tool set for constructing SOA applications. Once approved by the Eclipse community, the STP project will be the Eclipse top-level project to address the needs of developers building and implementing Service Oriented Architecture projects. The STP project proposal is available on the Eclipse Foundation Website for review and comment for the next 30 days at http://www.eclipse.org/projects/index.html.

“The trend for SOA infrastructure is away from expensive server-centric architectures toward open, distributed implementations. And good infrastructure needs good tools,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA. “Joining Eclipse and leading the STP project gives IONA the opportunity to collaborate with a vibrant community to deliver simple, powerful and extensible SOA tools that let developers focus on development and integration challenges without limitations brought about by the complexity of the tools environment. Our participation in Eclipse also brings together our efforts in the ObjectWeb Celtix community with a world-class tooling effort.”

The initial scope of the STP project proposal will cover essential developer requirements for creation of service consumers and providers, the configuration of physical attributes of a service, definition of policies and governance for access or consumption of services, locating or adding services to an SOA and the creation of artefacts that can be used to deploy, enforce or manage SOA-based system participants. As part of the STP, IONA will lead sub-projects to deliver tooling for ObjectWeb Celtix, the open source ESB project sponsored by the company and tooling for JBI. Tooling for Artix, IONA’s commercially available ESB is currently Eclipsed-based and this code base will be made available to Eclipse. Further, the STP project will benefit from the work of existing Eclipse projects such as the Data Tools Project led by Sybase and Web Tools Project led by BEA and ObjectWeb.

“AS SOA continues to develop into a mainstream approach to enterprise computing, it becomes apparent that developers will need the right tools to deliver applications for these emerging environments,” said Mike Milinkovich, director, Eclipse Foundation. “IONA brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in distributed computing to the proposed SOA Tools Platform project and we are pleased with their decision to lead this effort at Eclipse.”

“The most basic principles of SOA adoption require that disparate elements within the enterprise can be brought together to create new business applications and support advanced business processes and today’s developers require the right tools to accomplish this, independent of the underlying technology,” explained Massimo Pezzini, VP and distinguished analyst, Gartner. “Open source tooling helps integrate the broad range of technologies needed to support a successful SOA deployment into a coherent framework.”

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