IONA Technologies PLC - Enterprise Application Integration - Category Directory

The IONA Building
Shelbourne Road, Ballsbridge
Dublin 4, Ireland

www.iona.com

Sales

$74 million

Business Description 

IONA is in the application integration software business. We make software work together so our customers can make better decisions, run their businesses more efficiently and improve their business results. Our software products enable our customers to build, maintain and scale their disparate computing environments while preserving and extending existing information technology (IT) investments. We also offer professional services, including ongoing customer support and maintenance as well as high-level design consultation, education and product implementation.

IONA was founded in 1991 in Dublin, Ireland. We have a history of providing standards-based solutions to IT organizations with complex, heterogeneous computing environments and challenging integration problems. We have a proven record of technology leadership and continuous product improvement.

We generate revenue from product licenses as well as from professional services. Since our inception, we have licensed our products, directly and indirectly, to more than 4,500 enterprise or divisional customers worldwide. On December 31, 2003, we employed more than 350 people in 22 offices worldwide.

IONA’s Opportunity

Our opportunity is to provide standards-based solutions to organizations wanting to use Web services and other technologies to solve enterprise application integration problems or to develop and deliver SOAs.

We are a leader in Web services technology, with a history of delivering award-winning Web services-based application integration products. We are also influential in the evolution of the Web services standards and how they relate to the delivery of enterprise integration capabilities. We also have a history of promoting SOAs. Our focus on SOAs is one of our core competencies. As more organizations deploy SOAs, we are well positioned to explain and deliver the benefits of an architectural approach to integration.

We have a history of promoting large-scale, standards-based application integration solutions for our customers. Our standards-based solutions allow our customers across a wide variety of industries to develop and deploy integration projects involving hundreds of systems, and tens of thousands of users.

Our deep commitment to industry standards mitigates our customers’ risk of being locked into a proprietary solution from a single vendor. Therefore, our standards-based solutions provide our customers a lower total cost of ownership of software, developer training, implementation services, and ongoing support.

Similarly, our demonstrated SOA expertise facilitates the connection of our customers’ IT assets to a common backbone which empowers our customers to leverage and reuse those existing assets. The best SOAs are based on standards, which insulate the customer’s integration investments from future changes in technology, products, selling channels and business processes. As other integration vendors announce their product visions around Web services and SOAs, our solutions are helping customers solve enterprise integration challenges with these technologies.

Strategy

Our objective is to be the leading provider of standards-based enterprise application integration solutions. To achieve this objective, we intend to pursue the following strategies:

• Maintain Technological Leadership. Our Web services-based Artix product family continues the Orbix tradition by addressing the application integration and mobile computing needs of large IT organizations through high performance, standards-based solutions. We will continue to invest heavily in research and development. By promoting and embracing existing and emerging industry standards, we intend to facilitate the broad acceptance of our products. We may acquire businesses, products or technologies that we believe will enhance and expand our current product offerings.
 
• Expand Our Customer Base, While Retaining Our Existing Customers. Many of our customers are large companies in a variety of industries that are deeply invested in both our products and our architectural approach to integration. The strategic importance of our products allows us, working with our partners, to develop strong relationships with our customers’ key technology decision makers. In addition, our strategic selling approach facilitates broad adoption of our products throughout a customer’s IT organization. All of these factors combine to represent an opportunity for us to continue to present new generations of technology solutions to our enterprise customers in the telecommunications, government and financial services industries. At the same time, the broader popularity of Web services gives us an opportunity to go outside of our traditional customer base to attract new customers with complex, costly and heterogeneous computing environments. We believe these new customers are interested in the reductions in IT cost and complexity that Web services and SOA can deliver. We also believe these new customers will find our traditional architectural approach, combined with our new generation of Web services integration solutions, compelling and competitive.

• Leverage and Expand Strategic Alliances. We understand that relationships with leading software and other technology vendors, as well as system integrators, create opportunities to gain customers in broader markets than those otherwise available to us. We are focused on leveraging our established relationships and forging new alliances to enhance our marketing, selling and implementation initiatives. We believe that many of these vendors and system integrators seek to partner with strong infrastructure technology providers that will enable them to more rapidly satisfy customer needs. We have existing relationships with leading software and technology vendors, such as Business Objects, Hewlett-Packard and Manugistics, and global system integrators, such as BearingPoint, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and EDS. We believe that these relationships better enable us to sell additional products to our existing customer base, acquire new customers and enhance our market presence.
 

Products

We offer two product families, Artix and Orbix. While our two product families are built upon different technology foundations, each promotes a SOA and standards-based approach to enterprise integration. In addition, both product families allow our customers to reduce the cost and complexity of enterprise IT and extend the life and value of IT investments.

Artix

We launched Artix in October 2003. Artix is our family of high-speed integration products built upon Web services standards. Artix is designed for organizations with complex and heterogeneous computing environments. These organizations use Artix to represent IT assets as Web services, making it easy to integrate these assets or to consolidate assets without disrupting operations.

Artix makes Web services, a promising but relatively immature technology standard, immediately useful in an enterprise context. For example, Artix empowers organizations to incorporate the proven enterprise features of their existing computing environments to add security, reliability, availability and management features to Web services. Artix lets organizations reuse existing middleware and application functionality to create secure, manageable Web services integration projects.

Artix is available on a wide range of hardware and software platforms including many variants of Unix as well as Microsoft platforms. Artix Mainframe is a mainframe-based version of Artix that gives organizations’ the ability to Web service enable IBM’s Information Management Service, or IMS, and Customer Information Control System, or CICS, applications. IMS and CICS support large-scale, transaction-intensive mainframe applications. Organizations with large investments in CICS and IMS are committed to the ongoing use of their mainframes, and need a secure means of reusing and extending the life of those investments.

Artix Mobile is a Web services-based process integration broker that improves mobile workers’ productivity by allowing them to work with enterprise applications and data regardless of their Internet connectivity. Artix Mobile transparently detects network connections—wired or wireless—and transparently and securely synchronizes data and documents between the mobile user’s computer and enterprise applications.

Orbix

Orbix is our original high performance infrastructure for mission-critical applications. Orbix is a comprehensive and proven platform for extending or integrating the most demanding component-based systems. Orbix encourages a services-oriented approach to component development and integration, with immediate benefits to productivity, efficiency and operational expense.

Like Artix, Orbix meets the needs of enterprise IT organizations by providing a set of enterprise qualities of service for security, asynchronous messaging, management, transactions, load balancing, and fault tolerance.

Services

We provide a variety of support and consulting services to our customers. Our professional services personnel provide our customers, partners and internal field organizations with educational services, as well as product and architectural consulting services. These personnel are senior technologists, with substantial expertise in leading integration and development technologies, including CORBA, J2EE and XML. Our customer support personnel are dedicated to the ongoing support and maintenance of our products. In addition to telephone-based and on-site product support, we also provide customers with a self-help support option in the form of a comprehensive online database of technical information and advice.

Our customers are encouraged to purchase annualized customer support agreements. Most product support is provided through a combination of telephone and e-mail support from our Dublin, Ireland headquarters and our U.S. subsidiary’s office in Waltham, Massachusetts. Our original equipment manufacturers, value-added resellers and independent software vendors depend on our customer service team to provide backup for the front-line support that these vendors provide to their customers.

As of December 31, 2003, our services organization was comprised of 62 employees.

JBoss

The JBoss Group markets the industry’s leading open-source J2EE application server, JBoss. Through our strategic alliance with the JBoss Group, we provide enterprise-level JBoss users with J2EE consulting, training, and support services. Our services and our history as a provider of enterprise J2EE products, help JBoss users integrate the JBoss platform into complex, heterogeneous, mission-critical environments.