12/04/2006

IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a specialist in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, today announced availability of Celtix™ Enterprise, the company's open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

ebizQ received the following details:

Celtix Enterprise provides enterprise-class ESB capabilities, backed by IONA's world-class services organization. This powerful combination of technology and corresponding consulting, training and support, delivers the core foundation required by companies that wish to deploy SOA based on open source technologies.

The release of IONA's Celtix Enterprise builds on the company's established strategy of offering Global 2000 customers a comprehensive set of distributed SOA infrastructure solutions that can be deployed incrementally to help companies streamline and modernize their IT systems while generating greater ROI and lowering the fixed cost of IT operations. At its core, Celtix Enterprise utilizes a lightweight, pluggable service engine that enables customers to deploy the base functionality necessary to achieve a project's goal, and to add new capabilities as business and technology requirements evolve. Recognizing that many customer sites will not have adopted open source in 100% of their enterprise, Celtix Enterprise is compatible with several company developed SOA technologies, including those in IONA's Artix™ product family, such as the Artix ESB and Artix Orchestration.

"Mainstream customers are increasingly embracing open source technologies to drive down their fixed infrastructure costs and avoid vendor lock-in, while the leading edge IT organizations are using open source to gain greater control over their software resources," said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. "For open source technologies to have a distinct impact on mainstream SOA adoption, they must provide standard interoperability with legacy and modern closed source technologies, offered with support and services dedicated to SOA integration."

With Celtix Enterprise, IONA has brought together existing and emerging SOA standards along with widely deployed community-developed software and new SOA innovation. Celtix functionality is derived from several key open source SOA infrastructure projects that have been tested and certified by IONA for compatibility and interoperability, and integrated to deliver critical ESB functionality. These include:

• Code from the Apache Incubator project CXF to provide the services framework



• Eclipse-based tooling from the SOA Tools Platform Project



• Code from the Apache Incubator project Qpid to provide an open source implementation of the Advance Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification

"Using Celtix, we've been able to very quickly get up and running with our SOA initiatives and at the same time carefully manage the upfront costs of our deployment," stated Dr. Tim Wood, information solutions director, Atkins Highway and Transportation. "Equally important is that we have IONA's world-class services organization behind us and the confidence of knowing that the Celtix services we deploy today will be an integral part of our SOA as it matures and evolves."

Celtix Enterprise offers customers the functionality and access to the consulting, training and support they require today to make open source an integral part of their SOA deployment strategy:

• Extensible Services Framework. The Celtix Advanced Service Engine is a lightweight, pluggable framework, designed for extensibility, used for creating and connecting Web services. Celtix Enterprise's Advanced Service Engine core is based on code from the Apache Incubator project CXF, which is an evolution of the ObjectWeb Celtix and Codehaus Xfire projects. Additionally, Celtix Enterprise implements the JAX-WS standard to ease development of Java services by automatically converting Java code to Web services. Eclipse-based tools based on the Eclipse SOA Tools Project are also integrated as part of Celtix Enterprise.



• Messaging Infrastructure. The Celtix Advanced Messaging platform is a high performance, distributed messaging platform based on the open Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) as implemented in the Apache Incubator Qpid project. Celtix Advanced Messaging supports multiple messaging patterns including point-to-point message queuing and publish-subscribe. Additionally, the Apache Incubator project ActiveMQ is integrated to provide JMS messaging infrastructure within Celtix Enterprise.



• Flexible Deployment. Celtix Enterprise provides customers with several different deployment models including the use of lightweight containers based on the Spring framework and/or the Apache Tomcat project. Celtix Enterprise services can also be deployed in any J2EE or JBI container. This flexibility allows Celtix Enterprise to be deployed easily throughout an enterprise across multiple technologies.

"Our customers are aggressively driving the convergence of open source and SOA and they are seeking vendors such as IONA that are capable of providing the resources they require to make open source technologies a strategic part of their SOA deployment plans," explained Larry Alston, vice president, Marketing and Product Management, IONA. "IONA actively participates in many of the projects from which Celtix Enterprise is assembled. We offer our customers that expertise, together with the confidence that comes from working with a proven vendor that has more than 15 years of experience in supporting high performance distributed computing systems. Celtix Enterprise provides our customers with an open source solution for technology neutral, modern architectures that can be deployed incrementally, and help them achieve their SOA goals and objectives."