Norkom Chooses the IONA e-Business Platform as Infrastructure to Power the Norkom Alchemist Marketing Automation Platform

Business Wire, August 22, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

DUBLIN, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 22, 2001

IONA(R), the leading e-business platform provider for Total Business Integration(TM) (NASDAQ: IONA), today announced that Norkom Technologies, a leading International eCRM (customer relationship management) provider has selected the IONA e-Business Platform(TM) as the software infrastructure powering its market automation platform Norkom Alchemist(TM) Version 3.

Norkom Alchemist Version 3 is an eCRM application that delivers intelligent and interactive marketing automation, which fully integrates with existing CRM and third party applications. Organizations can deploy campaigns that are customer focused, personalised and reflective of an organization's business goals such as customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell/up-sell and lifetime value.

Norkom is utilizing the IONA e-Business Platform to deliver a high performance infrastructure that will provide Norkom customers with unprecedented scalability and reliability for their eCRM applications.

"We were determined to make the underlying architecture of our product highly scalable so that clients may be distributed across multiple identical services ensuring that response times are reduced to a minimum," stated Dr. Karl O'Connell, Norkom Technologies' Chief Technology Officer. "We've been using IONA's technology for some time and decided to migrate to the IONA e-Business Platform because it is one of the most advanced solutions available in the market."

"The IONA e-Business Platform offers a means to upgrade their eCRM application to be fully J2EE compliant," said IONA's CTO Dr. Sean Baker. "Taking this action now also means that Norkom will be able to make their applications available to web services clients beyond the firewall enabling automated business and customer interactions over the Internet."

About Norkom

Norkom Technologies (www.norkom.com) provides software and services that enable organisations to better understand their individual customers' behaviour and use that intelligence to effectively interact with them in the marketplace, resulting in higher profitability and lower costs.

Norkom's customers include US Cellular, Vhi-healthcare, British Airways, RCI/Cendant, KPN Orange, HFC bank, Bank of Ireland, Irish Life & Permanent, Esat Business, Digifone, Actel Direct, Vodafone (Click GSM), The Bank Leumi, and Lucent Technologies.

Founded in 1998, with headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, Norkom has international offices in the UK, Belgium, Israel and the USA. Norkom currently employs 140 staff. Norkom won the e-challenge 2000 "Best Internet & Wireless Company in Europe" award and the Irish Software Association "Business Innovation" award 2000. Paul Kerley, President and CEO of Norkom Technologies is the Ernst & Young "Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2000".

About Norkom Alchemist(TM)

Norkom delivers competitive advantage and enhanced profitability for our clients through enabling effective customer acquisition and retention strategies via its' complete "analysis to action" marketing automation platform - Norkom Alchemist(TM). Norkom Alchemist(TM) delivers predictive, timely and insightful intelligence to all customer touch-points, empowering organisations to effectively interact with the marketplace. Furthermore organisations can design, create and deploy automated personalized campaigns to improve one-to-one customer relationships across all sales and service channels, including face-to-face, call centre, kiosks/ATMs, web and wireless media.

About IONA

IONA is a leading e-Business Platform provider for Total Business Integration(TM). The IONA e-Business Platform provides users with a complete solution for end-to-end business integration inside and outside the firewall. The IONA e-Business Platform includes a J2EE-compliant application server, a mainframe and enterprise application integration suite as well as XML Web Services, Java and CORBA development tools, and a business-to-business integration (B2Bi) platform. Founded in 1991, IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company had revenues of $153 million in 2000 and employs more than 900 people in 30 offices worldwide. Please visit www.iona.com for more information.

IONA, IONA e-Business Platform, IONA XMLBus, XMLBus, iPortal Application Server, IONA Enterprise Integrator, IONA Mainframe Integrator, IONA B2B Integrator, iPortal SureTrack, IONA XMLBus, Orbix, Adaptive Runtime Technology and Total Business Integration are trademarks or registered trademarks of IONA Technologies. SUN, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, Java, and J2EE are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc in the United States and other countries. CORBA is a trademark or registered trademark of the Object Management Group, Inc in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.