IONA Technologies, , began life as a campus company in Trinity College, Dublin and was founded by Chris Horn, Annrai O'Toole, Colin Newman and Seán Baker. IONA maintains headquarter offices in Dublin, Boston and Tokyo.

The company specializes in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. IONA products connect systems and applications by creating a network of services without requiring a centralized server or creating an IT stack. IONA products are widely deployed in the telecommunications and financial industries.

On June 25 2008 it was announced that IONA will be acquired by Progress Software for about $162 million.

IONA and Standards

IONA is involved in the development of standards that are relevant to large-scale IT integration. IONA employs the Web service, Java, TMF and CORBA families of standards in their products, and is involved in the following standards bodies:

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)
• Object Management Group (OMG)
• Telecommunications Management Forum (TMF)
• Web Services Interoperability (WS-I)
• Microsoft/IBM Web Services Workshop Process
• Open Service-Oriented Architecture's Service component architecture (SCA)
• Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) Alliance

IONA and Open Source

IONA promotes both open source and commercially licensed software, participates in several open source initiatives and acquired LogicBlaze. IONA is involved in the following open source projects, and offers enterprise versions of the projects that are tested, certified and supported.

• Apache CXF project
• Apache ActiveMQ project
• Apache ServiceMix project
• Apache Camel project
• SOA Tooling Platform (STP) project at the Eclipse Foundation

IONA Products

IONA's initial integration products are built using the CORBA standard, and more recent products are built using Web services standards.

IONA's products include

• IONA Artix - advanced SOA infrastructure suite. Components include
• Artix ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)
• Artix Registry/Repository
• Artix Orchestration
• Artix Mainframe
• Artix Connect for WCF
• Artix Data Services (formally Century 24's Integration Objects (IO), C24 was acquired by IONA in March 2007)
• FUSE - IONA's enterprise version of open source projects that include testing and professional services. Components include
• FUSE ESB - enterprise version of Apache ServiceMix
• FUSE Message Broker - enterprise version of Apache ActiveMQ
• FUSE Services Framework - enterprise version of Apache CXF
• FUSE Mediation Router - enterprise version of Apache Camel
• Orbix - enterprise CORBA solution
• Orbacus - embeddable C++ CORBA ORB
• Professional services - training, consulting, and support