IONA Technologies

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IONA Technologies, Inc.
Type	Public (NASDAQ: IONA
Founded	1991
Headquarters	Dublin, Ireland
Industry	Computer software Consulting IT Services
Products	Artix ESB, Celtix Enterprise, Orbix, Orbacus
Website	www.IONA.com

IONA Technologies,NASDAQ: IONA, began life as a campus company in Trinity College, Dublin and was founded by Chris Horn, Annrai O'Toole, Colin Newman and Seán Baker.^[1]^[2] IONA maintains headquarter offices in Dublin, Boston and Tokyo.

The company specializes in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. IONA products use industry standards to connect diverse systems and are deployed without requiring a centralized server or creating an IT stack. IONA products are widely deployed in the telecommunications and financial industries.

1 IONA Products
2 IONA and Open Source
3 IONA and Standards
4 Competition
5 Notes
6 External Links

[edit] IONA Products

IONA has built its integration products around open industry standards, initially CORBA and more recently Web services standards, and a distributed and unifying approach to designing and implementing large-scale systems now referred to as SOA.

IONA's products include

Artix - extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Celtix Enterprise - a certified and supported open source Java ESB based on CXF and Qpid
Orbix - enterprise CORBA solution
Orbacus - embeddable C++ CORBA ORB
Professional services - training, consulting, and support

[edit] IONA and Open Source

IONA also participates in several open source initiatives and offers professional services for open source projects. The following open source projects represent a subset of Celtix Enterprise.

IONA is involved in the following open source projects:

CXF project at the Apache Software Foundation
Qpid projects at the Apache Software Foundation
SOA Tooling Platform (STP) project at the Eclipse Foundation

[edit] IONA and Standards

IONA monitors and is involved in the development of standards that are relevant to large-scale IT integration. IONA employs the Web service, Java, TMF and CORBA families of standards in their products, and is actively involved in the following standards bodies:

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)
Object Management Group (OMG)
Telecommunications Management Forum (TMF)
Web Services Interoperability (WS-I)
Microsoft/IBM Web Services Workshop Process
Open Service-Oriented Architecture's Service component architecture (SCA)

[edit] Competition

As of 2007, the Enterprise Application Integration market has shifted very much to Java/J2EE and Microsoft's .NET. J2EE suppliers like BEA, IBM, SAP and Oracle often generate revenue that is several times higher than IONA's. IONA failed to refocus on those J2EE technologies a couple of years ago. IONA's core Corba technology is nowadays a niche technology. The company tries to regain market share by offering Web Services-based products. It remains to be seen whether IONA will be able to catch up to the bigger competitiors.