DUBLIN, Ireland, and WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 10 -- IONA Technologies, a world leader in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, today announced updates to IONA Artix, the company’s advanced SOA infrastructure suite. With Artix, IONA offers Global 2000 customers an alternative to centralized and proprietary middleware stacks -- shortening implementation times, reducing costs and generating greater ROI from their existing IT assets.

The Artix suite includes, Artix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Artix Registry/Repository, Artix Data Services, Artix Orchestration, Artix Mainframe and SOA Management. The enhancements to Artix address customers’ growing requirements for SOA governance, management and interoperability across complex, multi-protocol and multi-platform environments.

Advances for Provisioning and Managing SOA Implementations

Artix Registry/Repository allows customers to utilize its active SOA governance capabilities to effectively develop, test, deploy and manage the lifecycle of services across their distributed SOA environments. Specifically, the updates include:

• Versioning support for services and other repository artifacts.

• The ability to customize the repository data model.

• An improved user interface for viewing a visual state of policies, services and containers, simplifying IT operations.

• And the ability to publish services to a UDDI V3 registry.

Extended Leadership in Supporting SOA Best Practices and Industry Standards

The latest Artix release includes support for the popular Enterprise Integration Patterns. By implementing this standard vocabulary of services developers reduce error rates and shorten the time-to-market for new services deployed across an SOA. IONA also adds capabilities for facilitating the development of complex BPEL processes in Artix Orchestration through support for BPEL message attachments and Identity and Mail services.

Enhanced SOA Onteroperability

Addressing customer requirements to speed the integration of heterogeneous environments, this latest release provides:

• Enhanced interoperability between Artix ESB and Artix Data Services eliminates the coding of data services with ESB services.

• Richer mainframe and CORBA service enablement functionality to extend the life of legacy assets.

• Artix Registry/Repository support for Artix Orchestration processes and IONA’s FUSE Services Framework services and containers.

“As customer’s SOA implementations evolve and the number of services deployed increases, interoperability and the ability to deploy new services quickly becomes critical,” said Massimo Pezzini, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc. “Additionally the ability to manage a diverse set of services which may have been created using 'traditional' closed source technology or open source technology delivers greater flexibility to enterprise customers looking to drive ongoing value from their IT infrastructure.”

“IONA is responding to evolving requirements as the market moves to the next phase of SOA maturity,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA Technologies. “The next phase in SOA deployment increases the need for SOA governance and management. Artix 5 addresses those needs while staying true to the Artix principles of technology neutrality and support for heterogeneous environments and open industry standards.”

IONA Artix is a suite of advanced SOA infrastructure products that enables customers to deploy SOA in a truly distributed manner. Featuring componentized, technology-neutral SOA infrastructure products that work together or independently, IONA Artix allows customers unprecedented flexibility in SOA adoption. The suite includes Artix Registry/Repository, Artix ESB, Artix Orchestration, Artix Data Services, Artix Mainframe, Artix SOA Works (tooling) and technology from our partners such as SOA Management from AmberPoint. IONA Artix is based on a lightweight, microkernel architecture that provides organizations with the ability to incrementally adopt SOA on their own terms, one step at a time.

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 products allow 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.