IONA Expands Customers' Open Source SOA Choices

July 12, 2007; 07:33 AM
IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) is a world leader in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments. The Company today announced a range of new offerings designed to deliver the enterprise-quality products, services and support programs, and opportunities for community participation required to successfully incorporate open source technology into strategic SOA deployments.

“IONA is making it safe for enterprises to adopt open source ESBs and to take advantage of the flexibility and capacity for innovation open source offers,” said Larry Alston, general manager, open source, IONA. “Core SOA functionality is rapidly becoming a commodity and with IONA FUSE™, we are giving our customers a powerful open source option for achieving this functionality in distributed environments, and one which is backed by a proven and trusted source for enterprise-level service and support.”

IONA’s new family of open source products are available now under the FUSE brand and are based on leading projects hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. The new FUSE components are designed to provide the fundamental requirements for messaging, service enablement and SOA connectivity in enterprise IT environments and are interoperable with Artix™, IONA’s advanced SOA infrastructure suite.

The introduction of these new open source products and corresponding service, support, consulting and training options follows IONA’s recent acquisition of LogicBlaze (press release April 10, 2007) and represents the integration of IONA’s Celtix™ family of open source products with components from LogicBlaze’s FUSE. Further, IONA is actively working with LogicBlaze customers to provide the proven enterprise-level support for which IONA is well known in the industry.

IONA’s new FUSE products include the FUSE ESB, based on the Apache ServiceMix project, the FUSE Message Broker, based on the Apache ActiveMQ project, the FUSE Services Framework (formerly Celtix Advanced Service Engine), based on the Apache CXF project and the FUSE Mediation Router, based on the Apache Camel project. All products in the FUSE family are backed by IONA’s proven services and support programs, tested and certified for interoperability, and can be deployed together or independently as best fits the customer’s unique deployment requirements. IONA is also introducing a new community-driven Web site, open.iona.com, to provide FUSE users with a wealth of resources to support the successful use of FUSE in customers’ enterprise SOA deployments.

As with all distributed SOA infrastructure products offered by IONA, the FUSE components are designed to support incremental adoption, are dynamic and adaptable to respond to evolving business and technology needs, and are standards-based to enable technology neutral deployment. Components can be deployed together or independently, and this differentiated approach gives customers unparalleled flexibility. IONA FUSE consists of the following:

• FUSE ESB – Based on the Apache ServiceMix project, FUSE ESB is built on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification, giving it an extensible, standards-based architecture. The FUSE ESB is lightweight and easily embeddable, offering several deployment options.
• FUSE Message Broker – Based on the Apache ActiveMQ project, FUSE Message Broker is a high performance, distributed JMS messaging platform. FUSE Message broker also supports a variety of cross language clients and protocols including Java, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, and others, increasing customer flexibility and ensuring that disparate systems can participate in SOA deployments without requiring significant reengineering.
• FUSE Services Framework – Based on the Apache CXF project and formally known as the Celtix Advanced Service Engine, the FUSE Services Framework is designed to deliver high performance, fully featured service creation, integration and flexible reuse of technical and business service components. FUSE Services Framework supports standards including SOAP, WS-RM, JAX-WS and others. This means that services created using FUSE Services Framework are interoperable and can be deployed alongside Web services created in other SOA environments. This inherent flexibility allows customers to deploy a SOA infrastructure in the manner most in line with their business and technology requirements.
• FUSE Mediation Router – Based on the Apache Camel project, FUSE Mediation Router offers customers a powerful rules-based routing and mediation engine that provides a POJO-based implementation of the Enterprise Integration Patterns. The FUSE Mediation router is also highly flexible and can easily work with a multitude of transport or messaging models such as HTTP, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA and others.
• FUSE Services and Support – IONA offers a complete set of enterprise-quality support offerings for FUSE users to help ensure success with open source SOA deployment. These support offerings address the full range of customer needs including Developer, Standard and Enterprise support, as well as FUSE training programs and architectural consulting. FUSE Developer Support provides access to IONA's 8x5 technical support center, guaranteed response times, and per-incident pricing for development teams getting their systems in production. FUSE Standard Support includes all the features in FUSE Developer Support, plus support for an unlimited number of incidents based on an annual pricing model. This offering is suitable for large projects in development stage and also production environments. With FUSE Enterprise Support, IONA's technical support center provides 24x7 support for mission-critical projects in production. FUSE Enterprise Support also includes immediate response times to critical production issues, a dedicated Technical Account Manager and packaged binary drops upon request.
• open.iona.com – open.iona.com is the new FUSE community Web site that features user forums and Wikis, tutorials, sample applications, and documentation designed to help users at all stages of their FUSE adoption. The site also features a streamlined download process, access to tooling and early access to additional project code.

“Few would question the increasing adoption of open source technologies within enterprise IT organizations, and this is particularly true in many SOA implementations,” said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst at RedMonk. “While adoption typically is driven by low barriers to entry, the criteria for deployment to production include an active community and solid support and service options.”

About IONA FUSE

IONA FUSE is a family of advanced, open source SOA infrastructure products closely aligned to Apache Software Foundation projects. IONA FUSE features componentized, standards-based and technology-neutral SOA infrastructure products that work together or independently and allows customers unprecedented flexibility in SOA adoption. The family includes FUSE ESB, based on the Apache ServiceMix project, FUSE Message Broker, based on the Apache ActiveMQ project, FUSE Services Framework, based on the Apache CXF project and FUSE Mediation Router, based on the Apache Camel project.

About IONA

For more than a decade, IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) 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 allows customers to take advantage of the economic benefits associated with the use of open source software.

IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts and offices worldwide. For additional information about IONA, visit our Web site at http://www.iona.com.

IONA, IONA Technologies, the IONA logo, Orbix, High Performance Integration, Artix, FUSE and Making Software Work Together are trademarks or registered trademarks of IONA Technologies PLC and/or its subsidiaries. CORBA is a trademark or registered trademark of the Object Management Group, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks that may appear herein are the property of their respective owners.