Iona, Sun partner for Solaris service bus
Published:10-May-2005
By BR staff writer
Iona Technologies and Sun Microsystems announced a technology and marketing agreement that will see Iona offer a version of its Artix enterprise service bus (ESB) for Sun's Solaris 10, and the pair working on Java Enterprise System integration.
Iona's Mark Rogers, the VP of platform partnerships who secured the deal from Iona's side, said Iona hopes to have a version of its so-called "Extensible Service Bus", Artix, available for Sun Solaris 10 by the third quarter. As well as supporting Solaris 10 on Sparc, he said the company is also going to support Sun's Solaris on x86.
"40% of Iona's customers are already running Solaris on Sparc," said Rogers, "and we have a number of customers testing our products on Solaris on x86, too." He said that Sun and Iona have always been close - in fact Sun was one of the original seed capital investors in Iona back when it was founded in 1991. "This is where we start to give back to Sun," Rogers said.
As well as joint sales and marketing initiatives, Iona will in the third quarter be offering an ESB that runs on Solaris 10 and that can act as the bridge between numerous disparate environments, for example mainframe, J2EE, message oriented middleware, Cobol, Microsoft .Net and others.
For Sun customers, Iona's Artix enterprise service bus could be used to enable Solaris Sparc and Solaris x86 to interoperate, or enable Solaris servers to interoperate with Windows, AIX, HP-UX or Red Hat Linux environments.
Iona says its ESB can be used to underpin service oriented architectures (SOAs) or help to connect legacy systems with more modern IT kit.
The pair also said they will enhance interoperability between Artix and the Sun Java Enterprise System (Java ES). They said enterprise interoperability is being addressed by the development of the Java Business Integration specification (JSR 208), to which Iona is already a contributor. "Java Business Integration will standardize integration and provide the foundation for SOA by providing an open extensible platform to build integration/SOA solutions and by providing a definition for a single document that defines the services that make up an SOA 'application,'" according to the companies.
