Progress Software and IONA Technologies have jointly announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which Progress Software has agreed to acquire IONA for $4.05 per share in cash. This represents a total equity value of approximately $162 million and approximately $106 million net of cash and marketable securities reported on March 31, 2008. The offer price per share is approximately 16% over the average price for IONA shares over the six months prior to the offer period announced by IONA on February 8, 2008. The IONA Technologies Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction and each IONA Technologies director has entered into an agreement to vote in favor of the transaction.

Upon completion of the transaction, which is expected to occur in September pending regulatory approval in the U.S., IONA shareholder approval and issuance of an order by the Irish High Court, IONA would become an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Progress Software.

Through its Artix product line, IONA provides Web-standards based integration technologies in support of a SOA. In addition, IONA offers open source SOA integration components through its FUSE product line. And, for 15 years, IONA has been the industry leader in CORBA integration technology, a well-established integration standard currently relied upon in mission-critical IT systems.

The IONA products complement the Progress SOA Portfolio, which consists of products that can be used standalone or together to form an entire SOA infrastructure. With the addition of IONA technology, legacy and high performance applications written in C++ or those built to the CORBA standard, can now expose reusable services that fully participate in a Web-standards SOA implementation. In addition, IONA also has smart endpoint integration with Microsoft's .NET Windows Communications Framework and the open source Spring Java application framework. These smart endpoints, service-enabling almost all existing applications, can work within any IT environment through a wide variety of network protocols and are fully compatible with the Progress Sonic ESB to form a complete SOA backbone for heterogeneous integration and interoperability.