Progress Software Corporation Acquires IONA Technologies

Addition of IONA's broad, standards-based integration technologies extends Progress Software industry leadership in SOA infrastructure for heterogeneous IT environments

BEDFORD, Mass. (BUSINESS WIRE)
25-Jun-2008

Progress Software Corporation and IONA Technologies plc announce that all regulatory and legal requirements have been satisfied and that the acquisition of IONA Technologies plc is now complete. Progress acquired IONA for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $162 million and approximately $107 million net of cash and marketable securities reported on June 30, 2008, which it funded with existing cash resources.

Joseph Alsop, co-founder and chief executive officer of Progress Software commented: "The addition of IONA will strengthen Progress' position as the industry's independent choice for infrastructure software supporting heterogeneous, distributed IT environments implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). IONA's products complement the Progress SOA portfolio with leading edge, best-in-class technology and enable a wider variety of interoperability and deployment options, including the support of high-performance, mission-critical systems based on C++ and CORBA. Moreover, Progress intends to leverage IONA's leadership role in standards bodies and open source software development."

In connection with the acquisition, Progress expects to issue options to purchase an aggregate of 542,800 shares of Progress common stock to approximately 90 former IONA employees who have joined Progress as part of the acquisition. The grants will be made pursuant to Progress' 2004 Inducement Stock Plan and are subject to the approval of the Compensation Committee of Progress' Board of Directors.

Progress expects to provide updated financial guidance with respect to the 2008 fiscal year reflecting the IONA acquisition in connection with its upcoming third quarter earnings release and conference call currently scheduled for September 18, 2008.

Frequently Asked Questions

1) Why is Progress acquiring IONA?
To strengthen Progress' leadership position as an independent supplier of standards-based, heterogeneous, distributed SOA infrastructure. The IONA acquisition helps Progress achieve this goal in the following ways:

IONA products complement the Progress SOA Portfolio with leading edge, best-in-class technology for the widest variety of heterogeneous deployment options and interoperability.
IONA products extend the reach of the SOA Portfolio to users of high-performance, mission-critical systems based on C++ and CORBA.
IONA has a leadership role in standards bodies and open source initiatives, both critical to maintaining truly independent market leadership.
The impressive and long-standing IONA customer base provides a large opportunity for utilization of Progress SOA Portfolio products as they migrate toward SOA.
IONA has an experienced and talented team that has built a reputation with Global 2000 enterprises for addressing the most complex integration challenges through innovative and cost-effective solutions.

2) What were IONA's key innovations?
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 products includes supported, enterprise releases of Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF and Camel. All three of these products remain an important part of Progress' go-forward strategy.

3) What products will the IONA acquisition add to the Progress portfolio?
IONA has three product lines: The Artix product line for SOA infrastructure, the open-source FUSE SOA products and Orbix middleware for integration based on the CORBA standard.

The Artix product line includes Artix ESB, Artix Data Services, Artix Registry/Repository, Artix Orchestration, and Artix Mainframe.

Artix ESB provides integration through the service enablement of "smart endpoints" which can communicate using a wide variety of formats and protocols. Artix ESB includes a C++ based as well as a pure Java based runtime.
Artix Mainframe helps organizations extend the life and accessibility of their mainframe applications via Web services and C++/CORBA enablement.
Artix Data Services is notable for its standards-based data transformation, validation and enrichment and its support for the financial industry including SWIFT, ISO20022, and SEPA messages.
Artix Orchestration is a BPEL-based technical orchestration product that takes advantage of the underlying Artix support for services, transports and qualities of services.
Artix Registry/Repository provides for dynamic provisioning of endpoints in a distributed SOA network or "services grid"

FUSE is an open source product line based on several Apache projects for which IONA provides leadership and has been a significant contributor (ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF, and Camel). IONA provides subscription-based support, consulting and training for the FUSE release. FUSE provides companies with the best of both worlds, Apache community developed software together with enterprise level of productization, support, and professional services for cost effectively implementing and deploying SOA. FUSE components are also embedded in several of the Artix products.

The CORBA product line consists of Orbix 3, Orbix 6 and Orbacus. IONA has the largest deployed CORBA customer base of any vendor, built up over a 15 years of providing standards-based integration for mission critical systems. IONA's customer oriented policies on support and product upgrades as well as their CORBA expertise continue to keep Orbix and Orbacus deployed in long lived mission critical systems for enterprises and governments worldwide. We expect that the combined product offers of Progress and IONA will be of interest to customers looking to modernize and extend their CORBA implementations.

4) How does the IONA SOA strategy align with the Progress SOA strategy?
The SOA strategies of both companies are complementary and reinforce each other. Both focus on best-in-class products usable alone or together in heterogeneous customer environments. The products from both companies are known for their success in the most demanding IT environments.

IONA's multi-platform, multi-protocol enablement and mediation technologies complement Sonic ESB's messaging-based infrastructure. Artix has already been integrated with Progress' Actional products. Many other products including Progress® products such as Apama®, SonicMQ®, and DataXtend® Semantic Integrator can interoperate with Artix products through standards-based communications.

IONA's Open Source Strategy and FUSE product line also dovetail with Progress' SOA/ESB strategy by broadening the reach of Progress sponsored technologies and seeding the market for value added capabilities such as SOA management, Complex Event Processing (CEP) and data interoperability services.

5) How will the SOA product lines be combined?
The Artix products will become part of the Progress SOA portfolio, making it easier to service-enable a wide range of systems. The Progress SOA portfolio consists of best-in-class products that bring customer value individually or in combination.

Artix already interoperates with the Sonic ESB. In addition, product integration between Artix and Actional for run-time visibility and governance is already underway as part of an existing partnership between IONA and Progress.

Other products include Progress Apama and Progress SonicMQ. The Progress Apama CEP platform can use Artix JMS-based integration to provide the operational intelligence to monitor, act, and respond to the business events in the IONA customer environment. Progress SonicMQ can provide standards-based high-reliability and high-performance messaging for IONA customers.

6) What will happen to the CORBA products and the current customers?
CORBA is a major product family that continues to deliver tremendous value to a large customer base with mission-critical systems. Orbix Version 3 and Version 6, the two Orbix versions currently supported by IONA, as well as Orbacus, will be maintained and evolved based on customer needs, as IONA has done for 15 years.

In addition, Artix has enabled many of IONA's CORBA customers cost effectively to integrate their CORBA-based systems with .Net, J2EE and Web Services-based systems. With the increased range of SOA products from the combined organizations, Progress will be able to offer even more options to customers get the most from and extend their CORBA systems.

7) What will happen to current customers of IONA Artix?
The Artix offering is complementary to the Progress SOA portfolio. We will continue to invest in the Artix product roadmap and Artix will become an integral and on-going part of the Progress SOA portfolio.

8) What is Progress' plan for IONA's open source FUSE customers?
Progress will be continuing the FUSE business. The FUSE product line will continue to evolve and Progress will continue to offer support, consulting and training services for the FUSE open source product line. More importantly FUSE customers will benefit from Progress' global reach and organizational expertise in messaging, ESB, and SOA expertise.

9) Will Progress keep the IONA company name or product names?
IONA will be fully integrated into Progress Software, and therefore will adopt the Progress Software company name. Progress expects to retain most IONA product names, however, this will be reviewed over the months following the acquisition.

10) Will IONA technical support contact information change?
Contact information for IONA technical product support remains the same. For IONA support information online, please visit www.iona.com/support/.

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