IONA, a world leader in high performance integration solutions for mission critical IT environments, today announced that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries LTD (MHI) has deployed IONA’s Orbix® products to integrate its Product Data Management (PDM) solution with mainframe-based and other related systems.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is one of the world’s leading global heavy machinery manufacturers whose diverse line-up of products and services encompasses ship building, steel structures, power plants, chemical plants, steel plants, environmental equipment, machinery for industrial and general use, aircraft, space rocketry and air-conditioning systems. As such, MHI’s IT infrastructure is heterogeneous, and consists of a wide variety of operating systems, technologies, and environments. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries chose to adopt PDM technologies to connect and streamline some aspects of its design and manufacturing systems.
The challenge for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was integrating and deploying PDM across its existing IT infrastructure. To support the installation and deployment of PDM across its systems, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries chose CORBA technology provided by IONA’s Orbix software.
IONA’s Orbix made it possible for MHI to deploy PDM technologies across a wide variety of development languages and operating systems like Windows, Unix, C++, Java, COBOL, PL/I, Visual Basic and others. And because all components of the system support the CORBA communication standard, MHI can quickly add new applications in the future.
“We are extremely proud to have been chosen by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to support this important project,” said Dr. Chris Horn, CEO and co-founder of IONA. “The continued choice of Orbix and CORBA by thousands of organizations worldwide to build, deploy and integrate their mission-critical systems is evidence of the technologies’ maturity, and the inherent value of taking a services-oriented approach to integration.”
IONA was also able to provide services such as CORBA best practices, design and mounting of prototypes, and training and consultation. For system tie-ups of different environments, Metaphase on an HP platform and PL/I for common reporting on the mainframe were used to build a real-time linked environment. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries purchased licenses for IONA’s Orbix in the 1st half of 2003.
IONA’s Orbix is the world’s leading CORBA ORB and IONA’s original high-performance integration solution for mission-critical applications. Orbix provides a comprehensive and proven platform for extending or integrating the most demanding component-based systems. And, like all of IONA’s high-performance integration solutions including the new Artix family, delivers a services-oriented approach to component 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 provides a single, shared set of enterprise qualities of service for security, asynchronous messaging, management, transactions, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
