IONA Ships Orbix E2A Collaborate and Partner Editions - Industry's First Enterprise Web Services Integration Solutions With ebXML Support

Business Wire, Feb 6, 2002

Business/Technology Editors

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 6, 2002

Orbix E2A Eliminates Barriers to Integrating J2EE, .NET, CORBA,

Mainframe and Message-Oriented Technologies for Business Efficiency

and Return-on-Investment

IONA(R), the leading e-Business Platform provider for Web Services Integration (NASDAQ: IONA), today announced the general availability of the Collaborate and Partner Editions of its Orbix E2A(TM) Web Services Integration Platform.

"IONA is leading the Web Services Integration market as the first provider with shipping product and real Web services deployments," said Barry Morris, CEO of IONA. "While other vendors are still trying to re-engineer their proprietary solutions or just now disclosing their strategies, IONA is today helping customers and partners liberate their information assets and build services-based architectures that will cut costs, simplify new application development and deployment, and enable the flow of information from End 2 Anywhere."

IONA's Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform is a comprehensive integration solution that marries Web services standards with powerful business-to-business and enterprise application integration capabilities. Unlike solutions from other vendors that add Web services as a feature, Web services are at the heart of Orbix E2A. This eliminates the barriers to integrating independent technologies such as J2EE, .NET, CORBA, mainframes and message-oriented middleware. Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform allows organizations to create, deploy, consume and manage Web services integration solutions for immediate and tangible improvement in operational efficiency and return-on-investment.

The Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform Collaborate Edition extends the creation, deployment and management capabilities offered by the Orbix E2A XMLBus Edition with enterprise Qualities-of-Service including security, packaged application adapters for Baan, PeopleSoft, SAP and others, and support for emerging Web services standards-based protocols including ebXML and RosettaNet. These enterprise capabilities, along with support for emerging B2B standards, provide organizations the tools and management services required for reliable, scalable, and secure dynamic data exchange, business process automation, and composite applications both inside and outside the firewall.

"ebXML provides companies a standard method to exchange business messages, communicate data in common terms, and define business processes," said Klaus-Dieter Naujok, Chief Scientific Officer at IONA, former chair of ebXML, chair of UN/CEFACT's eBTWG and member of the UN/CEFACT Steering Committee. "Because Orbix E2A is Web-services centric in design and ebXML's process centric framework and use of the SOAP standard, Orbix E2A allows organizations to truly automate an entire business process with customers or partners from discovery to settlement."

In addition, Orbix E2A Collaborate Edition provides:

--high-productivity graphical tools that allow rapid creation of integration models, for business process management and data transformation

--application adapters to systems such as Siebel, SAP, JD Edwards, Baan and PeopleSoft that extend the value of internal systems by seamlessly incorporating them into business process flows

--technology adapters to systems built on MQ-Series, mainframes, JMS, J2EE, CORBA, XML and relational databases

--support for key B2B standards such as ebXML, RosettaNet, cXML, xCBL and EDI for rapid implementation of business processes

--a patent-pending security system that provides encryption, authentication, non-repudiation, and digital signatures to ensure secure transactions between business partners

--an easy-to-use, GUI-based business process engine that provides the ability to audit, monitor and optimize business processes without expensive process engineering initiatives

--a distributed architecture that provides high levels of scalability and reliability

The Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform Partner Edition provides small and medium enterprises a robust, yet easy-to-use platform for business collaboration between trading partners. Like the Orbix E2A Collaborate Edition, Orbix E2A Partner Edition offers users simple-to-use graphical tools for defining business collaboration processes with their trading partners, as well as powerful transformation tools to provide easy conversion between different data formats. This low-cost solution allows easy information exchange with Collaborate-based information hubs or other Partner Edition deployments.

The Partner Edition also provides:

--support for information exchange using EDI, XML and other industry-standard document formats

--encryption, authentication non-repudiation and digital signatures to enable secure communication with partners

--technology adapters that allow rapid integration with the desktop applications that run a small business, such as Microsoft Excel and Intuit QuickBooks

Availability

The Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform Collaborate and Partner Editions are immediately available. For more information, please visit www.iona.com or call IONA sales at 1-800-672-4948.