DECISION SUPPORT MIDDLEWARE APPLICATION WINS IONA TECHNOLOGIES' ANNUAL ORBIXAWARDS

IONA Technologies has announced the recipient of this year's OrbixAwards competition, Kaushal Chari, assistant professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at the University of Florida. Now in its third year, the OrbixAwards program offers an excellent opportunity for students and faculties to translate their research in distributed object technology into real-world applications. The recipient of this year's OrbixAward, Kaushal Chari, entitled his application "Distributed Decision Support Over Intranets: An Intelligent Approach".

Using IONA's Orbix, Chari developed an application that supports distributed decision making over the intranet. Intranet applications which leverage information stored on a wide variety of systems throughout an organization's enterprise are becoming increasingly important as organizations merge, grow and expand on a global basis. Orbix, the world's leading product in 'Making Software Work Together*' was the natural choice to create an application that seamlessly tied together scattered heterogeneous systems.

As the winner of the 1998 OrbixAwards, Chari was awarded an all-expense paid trip to IONA World, the world's premier showcase for the middleware products and technologies being used by companies today to solve the challenges of systems integration.

"Each passing year sees extensive growth in both the volume and quality of entrants into the OrbixAwards program. This growth graphically illustrates the growing importance of CORBA-based middleware as the key enabling technology for companies looking to build powerful, cross-platform integrated solutions," stated Conor Halpin, vice president of strategic relationships at IONA Technologies. "OrbixAwards provides the global academic community with an opportunity to showcase their work and expertise in building real-world middleware applications. It is a natural extension of our education program which provides universities with a simple and structured way of gaining access to the world's leading CORBA-based middleware technology. The quality of research conducted by students around the world continues to enhance the quality and scale of commercial middleware projects."

"IONA's OrbixAwards program is a great opportunity for faculty and students to experiment with CORBA hands-on and create real-world applications," stated Chari Kaushal, Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. "CORBA is being deployed at organizations world-wide to solve their business problems. As industries become more globalized and information more dispersed CORBA will be an essential ingredient in the creation of all systems. To this end, it is extremely important that my students, who will be working in the field, are familiar with how to use it and its importance in making software work together. I am looking forward to attending IONA World this year, having the opportunity to hear what many of IONA customers and partners are doing using CORBA and expanding my knowledge on the latest innovations in middleware."

For more information on the OrbixAwards contact IONA Technologies toll free at 1-800-Orbix4U (6724948) or via e-mail at: orbixawards@iona.com

For more information on the Internet visit: http://www.iona.com/clientpart/orbixwise/OrbixAwards.html

Founded in 1991, IONA Technologies is a world leader in 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 scaleable manner. According to IDC's market research, Orbix, which is used by over 3,500 businesses worldwide and conforms to the Object Management Group's CORBA specification, is the world's leading object middleware product.