American Airlines Delivers Powerful On-Line Customer Service With IONA Technologies' Orbix

Business Wire, August 5, 1998

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 5, 1998--Sight & Sound Software, Inc., a leading software and multimedia development company, has designed and deployed a powerful web-based reservation engine for American Airlines which takes advantage of IONA Technologies' (NASDAQ:IONAY) Orbix(R) as the infrastructure for making the different web components work together. The American Airlines web site (http://www.aa.com/) is already the most popular airline site on the web according to Media Metrix. The new reservation system was designed to meet the high volume of customer traffic to the site and to integrate the easy to use web based interface to SABRE(TM), the world's largest travel reservation system providing worldwide service to airlines and travel agents for booking flights, rental cars and hotels.

Sight & Sound Software, Inc., a member of IONA's popular OrbixWise partner program, developed the overall architecture for the reservation system. It utilizes Orbix to track the user's progress through the reservation process and to handle communication and data formatting. IONA's Orbix family of products was chosen as the middleware for the application because of its leadership position in the marketplace and its flexible, scalable and robust capabilities.

"IONA Technologies' Orbix delivered a flexible infrastructure that enabled the personalization of the web site content and the swift completion of the project in six months by managing the complexity of getting a variety of systems, or components, running on separate host computers to communicate seamlessly," stated Mark Tilden, chief technology officer of Sight & Sound. "American Airlines' third generation travel site incorporates the latest technology to deliver personalized content to millions of its customers and provides the best travel services on the Internet."

"Sight & Sound Software performed well on a complex project with an aggressive timeline," stated John Samuel, American's director of Interactive Marketing. "They've delivered a powerful and effective web application that combines the SABRE reservation system with the latest e-commerce and database technologies. The combination is very effective as it provides our customers with the functionality they need to easily handle their own travel arrangements faster as well as take advantage of great fares."

"The huge popularity and high traffic of American Airlines' web site demands the use of robust proven middleware technology," stated Kieron Branagan, director of business development, Airline and Travel Industry Group at IONA Technologies. "Sight & Sound have delivered a reservation system access product which ties together a host of different IT systems to provide a coherent and easy to use, though powerful application. This is illustrative of the diverse types of production ready applications utilizing Orbix as the middleware glue that holds the various components together and yet again demonstrates IONA's leadership position in making software work together."

Founded in 1994, Sight & Sound Software develops Internet and disk-based software, multimedia applications, software tools, and products. The company specializes in CORBA-based online reservation systems and build business and consumer applications that function powerfully and operate intuitively for clients that include American Airlines, Canadian Airlines, OrCAD, Successful Money Management Software, and Analogy. For more information write to Sight & Sound Software, Inc. 1100 NW Compton Dr. Suite 205, Beaverton, OR 97006, phone (503) 531-2855, fax (503) 531-2856, or visit our web site at http://www.sight-n-sound.com.

Founded in 1991, IONA Technologies (NASDAQ:IONAY) is the world leader in Making Software Work Together(tm). IONA's leading product, Orbix(r), provides customers with a standards based enterprise middleware solution to make diverse software components work together in a reliable, dependable and scaleable manner. According to IDC's market research, Orbix, which is used by over 3,500 businesses worldwide and conforms to the Object Management Group's CORBA specification, is the world's leading object middleware product.

NOTE TO EDITORS: To access IONA press releases and background material on the web, visit: http://www.iona.com/news/pressroom/. If you would like to receive IONA press releases by e-mail, contact Tom Murphy at tmurphy@iona.com

Orbix is a registered trademark of IONA Technologies. Making Software Work Together is a trademark of IONA Technologies. Personal Access, and Netfares are trademarks of American Airlines, SABRE is a trademark of AMR Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

    CONTACT: IONA Technologies Inc.
              Tom Murphy / Sarah Lima, 1-888-orbixPR  (6724977)
              tmurphy@iona.com / sarahl@iona.com