Enhanced interoperability, active governance and standards support advance IONA’s unique and efficient approach to SOA

DUBLIN, Ireland & WALTHAM, Mass. – December 10th, 2007 – IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance demanding IT environments, today announced updates to IONA Artix™, the company’s advanced SOA infrastructure suite.  With Artix, IONA offers Global 2000 customers an alternative to centralised and proprietary middleware stacks shortening implementation times, reducing costs and generating greater ROI from their existing IT assets.
 
The Artix suite includes, Artix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Artix Registry/Repository, Artix Data Services, Artix Orchestration, Artix Mainframe and SOA Management.  The enhancements to Artix address customers’ growing requirements for SOA governance, management and interoperability across complex, multi-protocol and multi-platform environments.  These updates include:   

Advances for provisioning and managing SOA implementations

Artix Registry/Repository allows customers to utilise its active SOA governance capabilities to effectively develop, test, deploy and manage the lifecycle of services across their distributed SOA environments.  Specifically, the updates include: 
•   Versioning support for services and other repository artifacts
•   The ability to customise the repository data model
•   An improved user interface for viewing a visual state of policies, services and containers, simplifying IT operations
•   And the ability to publish services to a UDDI V3 registry

Extended leadership in supporting SOA best practices and industry standards

The latest Artix release includes support for the popular Enterprise Integration Patterns(1).  By implementing this standard vocabulary of services developers reduce error rates and shorten the time-to-market for new services deployed across an SOA.  IONA also adds capabilities for facilitating the development of complex BPEL processes in Artix Orchestration through support for BPEL message attachments and Identity and Mail services.

Enhanced SOA interoperability

Addressing customer requirements to speed the integration of heterogeneous environments, this latest release provides:
•   Enhanced interoperability between Artix ESB and Artix Data Services eliminates the coding of data services with ESB services
•   Richer mainframe and CORBA service enablement functionality to extend the life of legacy assets
•   Artix Registry/Repository support for Artix Orchestration processes and IONA’s FUSE™ Services Framework services and containers

“As customer’s SOA implementations evolve and the number of services deployed increases, interoperability and the ability to deploy new services quickly becomes critical,” said Massimo Pezzini, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Inc.  “Additionally the ability to manage a diverse set of services which may have been created using ‘traditional’ closed source technology or Open Source technology delivers greater flexibility to enterprise customers looking to drive ongoing value from their IT infrastructure.” 

“IONA is responding to evolving requirements as the market moves to the next phase of SOA maturity,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA Technologies.  “The next phase in SOA deployment increases the need for SOA governance and management. Artix 5 addresses those needs while staying true to the Artix principles of technology neutrality and support for heterogeneous environments and open industry standards.”

(1) Reference: Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf