DUBLIN, Ireland, and WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 4 -- IONA Technologies, a world leader in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, today announced that the Belgium Ministry for Education is using IONA’s FUSE Open Source technology for a newly introduced centralized student registration system. The system which was developed with ETNIC, the information technology agency of the Belgium French community, is using IONA’s FUSE ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to integrate the multiple applications, servers and databases to facilitate real-time registration and validation of over 1 million student records.

Prior to the implementation of the project, records for primary and secondary school students were stored in a variety of different locations and formats, and facilitating a centralized system required the integration of over 8,000 disparate client applications. During the academic enrollment period the system will process approximately 1.5 million student registrations. Online registrations will be securely processed by the system, generating web services messages which will be assigned a "client certificate," which in turn will be validated by the ESB.

“With the ESB providing the critical integration needs for this SOA project we needed to ensure the chosen technology would be robust enough to handle the inherent complexities involved in bringing together multiple applications and securely managing the volume of registrations on the system,” said Lilian Duchêne, SOA technical project manager for ETNIC. “FUSE ESB provided the high levels of performance, reliability and flexibility required for a project of this scale and with the expertise of IONA’s services and support organization we quickly concluded that this professional Open Source model would deliver results across the project on both a technical and business level.”

FUSE is IONA’s tested and certified open source product family based on popular projects developed at the Apache Software Foundation. IONA provides professional support, consulting and training for enterprise customers looking to deploy open source SOA technology in mission-critical business applications. FUSE ESB is the validated, tested, and documented release of Apache ServiceMix that IONA packages and distributes under the Apache license, and provides a full set of services, including training, consulting and 24X7 enterprise level production support.

“The IONA team played a significant role in the success of this project,” continued Duchêne. “With the help of IONA’s professional services and IONA’s Guillaume Nodet who is PMC chair of the Apache ServiceMix project, we completed a successful pilot and quickly progressed to full development and roll-out of the project. This first project gave us the opportunity to learn how to work with an ESB and how to adapt our back-end architecture so that it could perfectly match the SOA best practices. The next step will be to connect our ESB with other ESBs in Belgium to build a secure channel based on standard user authentication exchange and also to create a distributed architecture where the ESB will be a technical layer within the overall SOA architecture.”

“Government organizations worldwide are realizing the benefits of deploying professional open source technologies as part of their strategic IT initiatives,” said Larry Alston, vice president and general manager for open source at IONA Technologies. “Customers are exploring Open Source Middleware technology as a more cost effective deployment option and with IONA there is no compromise on product performance or professional support, services and consulting. FUSE is fully certified and supported to the highest enterprise level standards.”

Further information on IONA FUSE is available at the FUSE community Web site at http://open.iona.com. The site also offers discussion forums, wikis, tutorials, sample applications and documentation designed to help users at all stages of their FUSE adoption.

About IONA

For more than a decade, IONA Technologies 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 products. IONA’s Artix, an advanced SOA infrastructure suite enables customers to leverage service-oriented architecture to streamline and modernize IT environments. The FUSE family of open source distributed SOA infrastructure technology allows customers to take advantage of the innovation and cost-effectiveness of open source software with complete enterprise support and technical services. IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Mass., and offices worldwide. For additional information about IONA, visit www.iona.com.