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Iona Technologies



·       Iona was founded in 1991 by Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Anrai O’Toole

·       The company progressed from a Trinity campus company, releasing Orbix in 1992 and going public in NASDAQ in 1997

·       Trinity College Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small group of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing systems, essentially connecting systems which were developed as independent systems to work and communicate with one another

·       Their research was initially supported by Trinity and then the EU

·       They took a brave leap from academic to the commercial world due to the attractive opportunity of industries like banking and telecommunications embracing networks and internets

·       Iona found that their customers had many systems which they had invested heavily in and what they really needed was a solution to tie these systems into a unified whole

·       It was Ionas mission to supply the technology toolkits and solutions that allowed them in essence to bring these together. This led to the company releasing Orbix

·       The amazing thing about Orbix was that it could link systems together regardless of their operating system, legacy etc.

·       Let’s for example, look at an airline company. Airlines rely on many systems e.g. catering, luggage offboarding, passport control which were all presumable built as individual systems with no regard for intra-operability. With Orbix, if the airline was running late and needed to be diverted to a new gate, they could communicate this to all systems despite their legacy and operating systems rather than having to update each system individually

·       The main issues Iona faced in my opinion is the transition from campus company to a large company with over 1,000 employees in Dublin, Boston and Perth

·       Through the course of the three case studies, we see them transition to a company who enjoyed after work drinks in a small bar on Baggot street to one with a culture identity crisis who had lost its “everyone knows everyone” culture

·       We can see that they are a customer centric organisation. The customer feedback loop is paramount to their success

·       We see employees on client site assisting in bug fixes and patch repairs without formally documenting these to communicate with the larger Iona organisation

·       We can see from the case study that they are looking to leverage agile technologies and I strongly believe that deploying an agile methodology like Scrum would be of great benefit to the company

·       Scrum would enable the company to increase communication across the business into bugs and upcoming features / products

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