Contact: Beth Mittelman Director of Investor Relations Phone: (781) 902-8033 Fax: (781) 902-8009 Email: [email protected] Date October 2004 IONA Technologies

The For more than a decade, IONA(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) has been a Company world leader in delivering high-performance integration solutions for enterprise IT environments. IONA pioneered standards-based integration with its CORBA-based Orbix(R) product family. The Artix(TM) product family, IONA's new generation of integration solutions, enables existing enterprise systems to be integrated with an organization's common infrastructure components. Customers use Artix to incorporate current IT assets into valuable new business applications through enterprise-class, standards-based connectivity.

With its partners, IONA can deliver NOW on the promise of service-oriented integration, making it possible for customers to achieve system longevity and agility at a significantly lower cost.

IONA's customers include Global 2000 companies in telecommunications, financial services, aerospace and manufacturing, including AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, NTT, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Winterthur Insurance, Zurich Insurance and Boeing.

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's story began in 1983, in the computer science department of Dublin’s Trinity History College. Long before the advent of such topical industry concerns as service orientation, Chris Horn, Annrai O'Toole and Sean Baker were absorbed in fundamental research, seeking to improve the interoperability of large-scale distributed computing systems. In 1993 that research produced the first release of IONA’s CORBA-based Orbix, which ultimately became the decade’s most successful IT infrastructure product, and the platform supporting some of the world’s most ambitious and large-scale integration projects. In 1995, the company opened its U.S. headquarters in Boston. Two years later, IONA began trading as a public company on the NASDAQ exchange, in what was then the 5th largest software IPO ever. Our IONA is distinguished by its architectural approach to integration. This approach Approach delivers solutions to organisations’ current integration challenges, while providing an architectural platform for ongoing, increasing realisation of IT value. IONA’s approach is founded on three fundamental principles: Ongoing complexity and heterogeneity. IONA understands that large enterprises have a history of addressing business needs with both internally developed systems and off-the-shelf applications, all in the interest of meeting business needs. No single platform or vendor can meet all of the software requirements of these organisations. The inherent complexity of enterprise IT is not going away, which means that organisations will always be looking for ways to leverage the value of past investments in software, including their legacy infrastructure. Standards-driven technologies. Organizations can combat IT complexity and heterogeneity through the use of industry standard technologies. IONA pioneered industry-standard integration with its CORBA-based Orbix products. Today, IONA builds its integration solutions around CORBA, Web services and J2EE, and our customers fully appreciate the cost-benefit, flexibility and independence that come from these standards. Service orientation. Service orientation and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are new terms for an approach to system development and integration that IONA has promoted since its inception. Service-orientation involves representing technology assets as business, and in so doing create independence between the technology and the business function. IT assets represented in this fashion become readily reusable and readily integrated with other systems. Service orientation has demonstrated its ability to extend the life of IT investments, and to reduce the cost of systems maintenance and integration. With this approach, IONA is focused on making IT organisations' accumulated infrastructure investments interoperable, without sacrificing performance, scalability or reliability. IONA has more experience than any other vendor in developing and managing complex distributed systems, and has an unmatched record of successfully deployed high-performance systems. IONA promotes an incremental, non-disruptive approach to making infrastructure and mission critical systems interoperable. And, has been true throughout its history, IONA is dedicated to creating interoperability through standards-based technologies, including CORBA, Web services and J2EE. IONA IONA’s products solve the interoperability challenges of enterprises with Solutions heterogeneous, multi-vendor IT infrastructures. IONA’s products make these mission-critical technology assets work together in ways that reduce costs and deliver flexibility, without sacrificing performance or availability. Compared with other integration technologies, IONA’s products are particularly suited to environments that demand high performance, scalability, and non-stop operations. All of IONA’s products are built with the strictest conformance to standards – notably CORBA, Web services and J2EE – to ensure compatibility, reliability, and longevity. And core to each product is ART, IONA’s patent-pending Adaptive Runtime TechnologyTM. ART is the engine behind the world’s biggest and most complex integration projects, and the key to the ease with which IONA products interoperate so easily. Artix™ is integration technology that service-enables existing systems in an extensible way. This extensibility is unique to Artix, and it is critically important to the large organizations that have adopted Artix. These organizations have numerous existing systems, representing multiple generations of architecture and technology. Today, these business-critical systems need to be interoperable with the many different transports and the various security, transaction, and data models that enterprise IT organizations have evolved. As an Extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Artix provides interfaces for customizing and extending services' support for security, transport, transactions, management, and so on. And Artix service-enables valuable IT investments without requiring changes to existing systems, and without denigrating their mission-critical qualities. Orbix™ is IONA’s original high-performance infrastructure for mission- critical applications. The world’s leading CORBA ORB, Orbix is a comprehensive and proven platform for extending or integrating the most demanding systems. It encourages a services-oriented approach to development and integration, with immediate benefits to productivity, efficiency and operational expense. Orbix is engineered to support the integration of CORBA with J2EE and/or Web services. Orbix has been used to replace proprietary application interfaces with standards-based interfaces, to build new distributed systems in Java or C++; to expose mainframe systems as services; and to non-intrusively augment existing systems with new functionality. It also provides a single, shared set of enterprise qualities of service for security, asynchronous messaging, management, transactions, load balancing, and fault tolerance. Mobile Orchestrator™ is a Web services-based process integration broker that improves mobile workers’ productivity by allowing them to work with enterprise applications and data regardless of their Internet connectivity. It transparently detects network connections – wired or wireless – and transparently and securely synchronises data and documents between the mobile user's PC and enterprise applications. Customers Financial Services: Chase Manhattan, Credit Suisse, Fleet Bank, Freddie Mac, GAD AG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Winterthur, and Zurich Insurance Telecommunications: AT&T, Bell South, Cingular Wireless, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel Networks, NTT DoCoMo, SBC Communications, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone and Wind Spa Manufacturing: Boeing, Chrysler, Flextronics International, Ford Motor Co., Hughes Network Systems, Raytheon, and Sanmina SCI Independent Software Vendors (ISVs): Business Objects, Cisco Systems, Dassault, EDS, Hewlett Packard, HotJobs – a Yahoo! Company, Manugistics, Netegrity, Portal Software, and VeriSign System Integrator Partners (Sis): Accenture, BearingPoint, CSC, and EDS

Financials IONA has a long history of solid financial performance. For the full year 2003, IONA reported total worldwide revenue of $74 million. IONA generates revenue from software license sales and professional services, each contributing approximately 50% of total revenue. On the service side, IONA offers maintenance, support, consulting and training services. IONA is a global company with over 50% of its revenue coming from the Americas, over 30% from EMEA and 15% from Asia Pacific. IONA sells through both direct and indirect channels, with approximately 70% of revenue generated by the direct sales force and approximately 30% generated by channel partners consisting primarily of Independent Service Vendors (ISVs) but also value added resellers (VARs). IONA’s strong balance sheet including $57 million of cash and no debt enables the company’s sustained innovation in areas of high performance enterprise integration. *All numbers and percentages quoted in this section are for the year ended December 31, 2003 in U.S. dollars Customer IONA's critical role in the rollout of the world's biggest integration projects is a Support reflection of more than product. It reflects a customer support organisation that has proven itself indispensable to managers of critical enterprise systems, 24 hours of every day, everywhere in the world. And it reflects a consulting group that is unrivalled in its ability to help organisations architect and implement high performance integration projects. Senior Dr. Christopher J. Horn, Chief Executive Officer Management Peter Zotto, President and Chief Operating Officer Dan Demmer, Chief Financial Officer Eric Newcomer, Chief Technology Officer Christopher Mirabile, General Counsel Sean Baker, Chief Scientist Larry Alston, VP Marketing Bill McMurray, VP Worldwide Sales Andrew O’Sullivan, VP Services Business Scott Devens, VP Products Business Mark Rogers, VP Alliances Offices Corporate Headquarters IONA Technologies PLC Dublin, Ireland US Headquarters IONA Technologies PLC Waltham, MA Asia-Pacific Headquarters IONA Technologies Japan, Ltd Tokyo, Japan URL www.iona.com