Columba Global Systems Selects IONA's e-Business Platform to Power Exprimer Platform

Business Wire, July 3, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

DUBLIN, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 3, 2001

Columba Global Systems Implements IONA's iPortal(TM)Application Server

and Orbix(R)2000 as the Infrastructure

Solution for it's Exprimer Platform

IONA(R), the leading e-Business Platform provider for Total Business Integration(TM) (NASDAQ: IONA), today announced that Columba Global Systems(R), a leading provider of J2EE-based platforms for database-independent retrieval and persistence (www.columba.com), has chosen IONA's e-Business Platform(TM) as the infrastructure for its Exprimer(TM) platform.

Columba Exprimer is a platform that enables clients to rapidly and accurately search for and aggregate information from multiple data sources with an intuitive and easy-to-use client. Exprimer allows users to perform powerful, complex and ad hoc searches that let organizations make the most of information stored in their corporate databases. Columba will integrate IONA's iPortal(TM) Application Server and Orbix(R) 2000 into their architecture to provide seamless interoperability between EJB components and CORBA servers.

Columba has implemented Exprimer against the J2EE(TM) standard, and uses IONA's J2EE-certified iPortal Application Server to provide reliable application deployment in addition to an integrated development, assembly and deployment environment that maximizes developer productivity. The rich deployment and data access features of the iPortal Application Server are built on by Columba to provide retrieval and persistence engines that abstract the data models and let organizations transparently integrate their corporate databases with modern e-business systems.

"The integration of IONA's iPortal technology into the Exprimer architecture will provide our customers with access to one of the leading enterprise data management solutions on the market today," said Brendan McKittrick, CEO of Columba. "Next generation business strategies rely heavily on technology integration and flexibility, which is why we chose to license IONA's e-Business Platform."

"Columba customers will derive a variety of benefits resulting from the alliance, including greater performance, scalability and availability within the Exprimer software," said Simon Pepper, IONA's product director for the iPortal Application Server. "Organizations are looking for ways to allow their e-Business applications to retrieve and update data from diverse databases without exposing any of the data models, and Columba's offering will deliver this."

The IONA iPortal Application Server combines strict J2EE standard conformance and unique Extreme Programming features with application integration and Web services generation tools to provide unparalleled usability, flexibility and reliability for enterprise applications. IONA's Orbix 2000 is the market leading CORBA platform for building and managing complex distributed applications. A core component of the IONA e-Business Platform, Orbix 2000 provides the reliability, flexibility and high performance essential for deploying mission-critical distributed systems. Like all components of IONA's e-Business Platform, Orbix 2000 is founded on IONA's patent-pending Adaptive Runtime Technology (ART), which is a highly modular and component-based architecture that allows customers to support new technologies quickly and build future proofed applications.

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. IONA's 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 1000 people in 30 offices worldwide. Please visit www.iona.com for more information.

IONA, IONA e-Business Platform, 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.