IONA and BellSouth to co-operate on Orbix for MVS; Market leading CORBA implementation to integrate Windows, Unix and mainframe applications

Business Wire, March 26, 1996

DUBLIN, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 26, 1996--IONA Technologies Ltd., and BellSouth have teamed to provide IONA's CORBA implementation, Orbix, on the MVS Open Edition operating system (now integrated into OS/390).

Orbix is IONA's market leading implementation of the Object Management Group's CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specification. With Orbix, programmers can rapidly develop distributed, object-oriented applications following a consistent and straightforward, standards-based model.

In collaborating to produce Orbix on MVS, BellSouth and IONA push distributed object technology and CORBA further up the enterprise ladder on to the mainframe. Orbix for MVS interoperates with Orbix on 20 other platforms enabling programmers to bring mainframe applications in the client/server frame.

"Through the use of internally developed middleware, MVS has held a central position in the BellSouth distributed systems environment for several years," says Tom Walton, director of BellSouth's Advanced Technology Group. "As we explore the potential of standards-based distributed objects within our computing environment, it is extremely important that MVS be able to play its role as a scaleable host."

Carol Burt, BellSouth Technical Director (and BellSouth's representative in the OMG) is the program manager for Distributed Systems Development within the Advanced Technology Group and the BellSouth technical lead in the joint development with IONA. "We realize that it is time to address distributed objects and that proprietary ORB and Object Services are not the best solution," says Burt. "Our relationship with IONA offers us the opportunity to ensure that commercially available object software will meet our needs, enabling us to reap the benefits of standards based development."

"This joint development effort with BellSouth underlines IONA's commitment to Enterprise computing," says Annrai O'Toole, chief technical officer at IONA Technologies, "Orbix is already supporting desktop and large workgroup applications, this is an excellent opportunity to get into the Enterprise market. Work is well underway. The initial release will provide Orbix on MVS OpenEdition and with BellSouth's help, we plan to support earlier releases of MVS, COBOL and integrations with CICS and IMS/TM."

"We are pleased with BellSouth and IONA's support for distributed object technology on OS/390," said Barbara McDuffie, program director of IBM's System/390 Solutions Provider Programs. "Orbix on MVS will allow our customers to develop enterprise client/server applications that not only realize the benefits of objects, but also reap the classic mainframe strengths of scalability and reliability. This announcment further illustrates the rapid transformation of the mainframe into an open, large scale server for enterprise computing."

A significant amount of the world's information -- estimated at up to 70 per cent -- is held on mainframe systems. The collaboration between BellSouth and IONA is the first step towards IONA's enterprise solution strategy. Scalability, security, and reliability are important issues for any system, but given the size of any implementation in BellSouth, these issues become key considerations. BellSouth deals with these issues everyday and access to its existing technology and experience will ensure IONA fully understands the requirements for Orbix on MVS.

Based in Dublin, Ireland and Boston, MA., IONA Technologies is the world's leading provider of CORBA conforming solutions. Its principal product, Orbix was launched in June 1993 as the first full and complete implementation of the Object Management Group's (OMG's) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard. With Orbix, programmers can develop distributed, object-oriented applications following a consistent and straightforward, standards-based model.

BellSouth provides telecommunications services in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. With headquarters in Atlanta, BellSouth serves approximately 21 million local telephone lines and provides local exchange and intraLATA long distance service over one of the most modern telecommunications networks in the world.

Orbix currently runs on 20 operating systems from a single code base. Platforms include: Windows 3.1x, Windows NT, Windows 95, OS/2, Macintosh System 7.5, twelve different UNIX systems, OpenVMS AXP and the real-time operating systems VxWorks and QNX. The product is also language independent with implementations for C , Java, Ada95 and SmallTalk. Orbix for Windows includes powerful integration allowing full two-way communication between CORBA objects and OLE-enabled applications such as programmes written in Visual Basic.

IONA has integrated Orbix with ODI's ObjectStore and Versant Object Technology's Versant object-oriented databases and Isis Distributed Systems' reliable distributed computing technology together with a variety of third-party middleware and tools. IONA is partly owned by Sun Microsystems subsidiary, SunSoft, Inc.