IONA Executive Named to ObjectWeb Board of Directors; CTO Eric Newcomer Joins International Open Source Consortium's Governing Body

Business Wire, March 13, 2006

DUBLIN, Ireland & WALTHAM, Mass. -- IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, today announced that CTO Eric Newcomer has been elected to the ObjectWeb Consortium's Board of Directors. The Board is annually elected by the Assembly of Members and is the top-level decision making body of ObjectWeb. As a member of the Board, Newcomer will play an active role in defining the strategic direction of the consortium and assisting with its evolution.

"2006 promises to be a year of change for ObjectWeb, and IONA will be a key contributor to the Consortium's evolution. As a worldwide recognized expert, Eric Newcomer will bring invaluable insight about the middleware market and technology trends," said ObjectWeb Executive Director Christophe Ney. "We are confident that Eric, along with the other Board members, will successfully conduct ObjectWeb through the new challenges that the organization is about to tackle."

As CTO at IONA, member of the Eclipse Foundation Board, and contributor to the Service Component Architecture initiative and the Web Services Transactions committee, Newcomer brings valuable perspective to the ObjectWeb Board. His understanding of the critical customer requirements for technology solutions that produce real business value, leverage existing assets and lower total cost of ownership can help the ObjectWeb community deliver open source software solutions that are effectively aligned to these business needs.

"The ObjectWeb Consortium is the leading open source community dedicated to middleware, and the home of the IONA-sponsored Celtix open source ESB project. It is an honor to be elected by the ObjectWeb community to its Board," said Newcomer. "Much like IONA, the ObjectWeb community believes that industry standard technology is the best way for customers to modernize their IT systems to meet new business challenges. Service Oriented Architecture and open source are two key movements that are converging to allow customers to accomplish important business goals and IONA and ObjectWeb are at the forefront of these trends."

About IONA

For more than a decade, IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) has been a world leader in delivering high-performance integration solutions for Global 2000 IT environments. IONA pioneered standards-based integration with its CORBA-based Orbix(R) products. Artix(TM), IONA's extensible Enterprise Service Bus, enables existing enterprise systems to be integrated with an organization's common infrastructure components. IONA's sponsorship of the ObjectWeb Celtix open source ESB is a natural extension of the company's history of solving integration problems by leveraging open standards and distributed architectures.

IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts and offices worldwide. For additional information about IONA, visit our Web site at http://www.iona.com.

IONA, IONA Technologies, the IONA logo, Orbix, High Performance Integration, Artix, Mobile Orchestrator and Making Software Work Together are trademarks or registered trademarks of IONA Technologies PLC and/or its subsidiaries. CORBA is a trademark or registered trademark of the Object Management Group, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks that may appear herein are the property of their respective owners.