IONA Technologies to License Microsoft COM Technology
DUBLIN, Ireland, and REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 26, 1998 — IONA Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced that IONA has licensed Microsoft® Component Object Model (COM) technology. This agreement provides a new level of interoperability between Orbix® , the leading implementation of CORBA, and Microsoft COM technology, the most widely used component technology in the world. This new COM-CORBA solution is scheduled to be available from IONA in beta release by February 1998. Platforms supported will include the Microsoft Windows NT® operating system and Sun Solaris.
“IONA is in the business of making software work together,” said Annrai O’Toole, chief technical officer at IONA. “We are not in the business of dictating to our customers. COM is a very important technology in the marketplace, and we need to make sure that everything we do with Orbix works well with COM. COM is just as important to IONA as CORBA, and our customers are not interested in religious wars or incompatibilities. We approached Microsoft to license COM because we believe this is the best way to deliver the best solution to enabling COM and CORBA to work together. In addition, we plan to support Microsoft’s services such as Microsoft Transaction Server.”
“We are delighted to license COM to IONA to enable it to provide a pragmatic solution to COM-CORBA interoperability in the market,” said Bob Muglia, vice president at Microsoft. “IONA’s licensing of COM will provide greater reach for customers as they deploy COM across their organizations.”
COM is in use on over 150 million systems worldwide, and has been licensed for use by Hewlett-Packard Co., Digital Equipment Corp., Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc. on UNIX and other systems. COM provides the richest set of existing services for applications today, as well as the largest set of development tools available from a wide variety of vendors.
IONA is completely focused on making software work together
™
. By licensing the COM source code directly from Microsoft, IONA can offer organizations a truly native COM-CORBA interoperability solution.
About IONA
Founded in 1991, IONA Technologies (Nasdaq “IONAY”) is in the business of making software work together. IONA’s leading product, Orbix, provides customers with a standards-based enterprise middleware solution to make diverse software components work together in a reliable, dependable and scalable manner.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
Microsoft and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
Orbix and “Making software work together” are registered trademarks of IONA Technologies Inc.
Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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