IONA Enhances iPortal Suite's Business Process Automation Capabilities Via Technology Acquisition From Suplicity

Business Wire, Jan 16, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 16, 2001

IONA(R), the Enterprise Portal Company(TM) (NASDAQ: IONA), today announced it has acquired business process automation technology from Suplicity, to enhance the integration capabilities of the IONA iPortal(TM) Suite.

Founded by NEC Corporation, and based in Littleton, Massachusetts, Suplicity addresses the connectivity issues faced by suppliers integrating with multiple trading partners. IONA has acquired the rights to use, modify and distribute Suplicity's business process automation engine, for incorporation into the iPortal Suite.

The IONA iPortal Suite is an integration, development and web presentation platform for companies building e-business and enterprise portal applications. The new technology acquired from Suplicity enhances the iPortal Suite's workflow capabilities, providing enhanced automation of business processes such as online receipt of purchase orders, catalog maintenance, invoice management, exception notification, auditing, and reporting. With this enhancement, the iPortal Suite better enables the design and automation of custom e-business processes, and facilitates the management of data across enterprises, from the mainframe to the web.

"Workflow capabilities are central to our iPortal strategy, and incorporating this technology into the iPortal Suite helps customers build better e-business applications," said Pat O'Brien, IONA's vice president of Product Planning and Strategy. "Suplicity has put significant research and development efforts into business process automation technology, and it fits very well with our iPortal offerings."

"Suplicity was launched to help solve the connectivity and business challenges that global business-to-business companies face in setting up exchanges, and other online e-business applications," said Dave Wiedmer, Suplicity's President and CEO. "We're thrilled to receive an endorsement from a leading e-business platform vendor like IONA, and we're confident that IONA's customers will benefit from this technology."

About IONA

IONA, the Enterprise Portal Company, is a leading provider of e-business infrastructure that helps organizations build and deploy enterprise portals, Internet commerce sites, and other large-scale distributed applications. IONA supports a full diversity of languages, including Java and C , and distributed computing technologies, including SOAP, XML, EJB, J2EE, CORBA, Microsoft's Windows DNA 2000 and IBM OS/390, CICS and IMS. Founded in 1991, IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with US headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company had revenues of $105 million in 1999 and employs more than 750 people in 30 offices worldwide. For more information, please see http://www.iona.com.

About Suplicity

Suplicity offers business-to-business supplier enablement services to companies seeking electronic connectivity and business process automation with their trading partners. Suplicity makes it easy, rapid, and affordable for these companies to become e-business enabled by providing services on a subscription basis to its customers alleviating companies from expensive e-business solutions software, the infrastructure costs to set up these solutions, and the technology requirements for such solutions. For more information see http://www.suplicity.com.

IONA and Orbix are registered trademarks of IONA Technologies. The Enterprise Portal Company, IONA iPortal Application Server, Orbix 2000, and Adaptive Runtime Technology (ART) are trademarks of IONA Technologies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.