IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives.

IONA's commitment to Open Source software is an integral part of its 15-year heritage. With a high degree of Open Source community involvement, IONA supports the efforts of its developers who are members and contributors to a number of ASF projects.

Aiding the efforts for increased adoption of Open Source SOA, IONA developers play key roles in the Apache ActiveMQ project, the Apache ServiceMix project, the CXF project in the Apache Incubator, and the Apache Camel project, a sub-project of ActiveMQ. IONA's distributed, Open Source SOA infrastructure solutions, FUSE Message Broker, FUSE ESB, FUSE Services Framework and FUSE Mediation Router, are built on code developed in those ASF projects and are distributed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0. IONA provides professional support, consulting and training for enterprise customers looking to deploy this Open Source SOA technology in their mission-critical business applications.

"IONA is in a new era of leadership in standards-based integration as we extend our commitment to and development of Open Source software for mission-critical enterprise IT deployment," said Larry Alston vice president and general manager of Open Source for IONA. "Community developed software drives innovation across the Open Source movement and is pivotal to its success. Our sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation underlines our commitment to upholding the principles and open operations policies that are the foundations of successful Open Source software projects. We look forward to supporting ASF and continuing to bring the benefits of Open Source software together with enterprise-grade support and certification to our enterprise customers."