04/24/2006

IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a specialist in high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, today announced that Artix™, the company's extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), has successfully demonstrated reliable and transactional interoperability with the upcoming version of Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) using Web services.

ebizQ received the following details:

WCF extends Microsoft's .NET Framework to enable developers to build secure, reliable, and interoperable Web services and is part of WinFX, Microsoft's managed code programming model included with the upcoming release of the Windows Vista operating system. This interoperability signifies that Artix customers can deploy Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) within highly complex, heterogeneous IT environments that will work across multiple platforms.

"For Global 2000 customers, a successful enterprise SOA requires that disparate applications be integrated reliably, securely, and transactionally, regardless of their underlying platforms. Artix allows this to be done," explained Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA. "Through our recent participation in Microsoft's Interop Plug Fest, we have demonstrated that Artix provides customers with SOA infrastructure software that can seamlessly incorporate applications built on the Microsoft platform into any IT environment."

Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation Interop Plug Fest is an open forum for those companies that have implementations of various WS-* Web Services protocols to meet with Microsoft engineers and test interoperability with the upcoming version of Microsoft's WCF. IONA successfully demonstrated Artix interoperability using SOAP 1.1, WS ReliableMessaging 2005/02, WS-Addressing 2004/08, WS-AtomicTransactions 2004/10 and WS-Coordination 2004/10. IONA is a Certified Microsoft Partner and a formal member of the Microsoft Windows Server "Longhorn" Technical Beta Program.

"Interoperability is vital to today's successful organizations looking to interact with customers and partners in new and valuable ways," said Ari Bixhorn, Director of WinFX Strategy for Microsoft. "We are pleased with the interoperability results and excited to see Artix communicating with WCF using the WS-* Web services protocols.