05/20/2008

IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, today announced the latest release of Artix™ Data Services, an open and standards-based development tool for building model-driven data services, and a key component of IONA's Artix advanced SOA infrastructure suite.

ebizQ received the following:

Artix Data Services shortens the data services development, test and maintenance lifecycle and improves the quality of data as it flows across heterogeneous environments.

Artix Data Services provides a graphical development tool to model data structures and semantics, and configure reusable, real-time data validation and transformation services. Enhancements within the latest release simplify data interoperability for messaging and SOA projects with improved productivity for developing, testing and deploying messaging data services, enhanced data model collaboration features and broader platform support.

New features include a transport abstraction layer, smart mappings, an aliases function and developer support for Apple OS X and Solaris platforms.

• Transport Abstraction Layer - The new transport abstraction layer enables rapid integration of over 50 common message transports, reducing the need for custom coding and making it easier for developers to change underlying transports. By leveraging the transport abstraction layer developers can easily test transports from within Artix Data Services Designer, eliminating the need for multiple testing tools and reducing the data services development and test lifecycle.



• Smart Mappings – offers developers new productive visual cues including autolayout and transform route highlighting, intelligent data conversion to automatically bridge different data types, and a search feature to quickly navigate the data model. In combination these features make it easier to build and maintain very complex transformations across XML and non-XML data sources involving hundreds of fields.



• Aliases - The aliases feature allows users to define alternate names for message structures to more meaningful terms for the business user or a regional localized dialect, facilitating data model collaboration enterprise wide and with business partners.



• Broader Platform Support - Artix Data Services Designer now supports Apple OS X and Solaris in addition to Windows and Linux.

Please see Artix Data Services 'What's New' for a complete list of updates.

Enterprise organizations are increasingly looking to build a data services layer to manage the flow and integrity of data across their IT infrastructure. Increased demands for real-time information, higher volumes of data required across various departments and partner organizations and increased regulatory requirements for compliance with a broader set of industry standards is driving the demand for more productive tools that can handle the data interoperability of complex XML and non-XML data sources.

"Many enterprises are challenged with manually managing and integrating across disparate information sources and models," states Sandra Rogers, Director of SOA and Web services research at IDC. "By creating a data services foundation with infrastructure to help manage the flow and representation of information in a more consistent, unified, and automated fashion, organizations can become much more efficient and enable developers and other IT and business professionals a common mechanism to dynamically provision, process, and consume data in a much more compliant fashion."

"Data services are a key priority for enterprise integration projects and are often described as the 'missing link in application integration'," said Wayne Meikle, Financial Services Industry Sales and Marketing Director, IONA Technologies. "Organizations are drowning in a sea of data. By focusing on reusable data services firms can accelerate the time to market for new business services, dramatically reduce development and ongoing maintenance costs, and improve overall operational efficiencies."