[Case Study] IONA 1

The story of the Irish startup IONA, formed by a group of academics and engineers from Trinity College Dublin, is quite an interesting one. They did have a dream leap over from academic to the commercial world with their popular product Orbix. They took early advantage of the possibilities of net. Some of the interesting features of their products which lead to its success can be summarised as below,

- Iona's software could be downloaded online via FTP access

- Orbit 1.0 defined the international trend in internet enabled computing with commercial implementation of the CORBA running across Windows and three major UNIX o/s.

- They excelled in object oriented design, where Orbix product could make a legacy software compatible with latest software, by 'wrapping' the legacy software in a compatible 'object' layer. Thus, many firms did not have to reinvest in modernising their legacy systems

- Used IDL (Interface Definition Language), which made designing distributed programs easy.

Some of the issues that occured at IONA were,

- Q&A did not catch the critical issue(a memory leak) which had to be given an o/s patch as a hot fix

- ridiculously large IDL: IDL even though simple to use interactively, introduces difficulty while building large programs

- patch installed in operations center, was it tested well before installing?

- time was a constraint here, for an important issue to be resolved

In my view, few steps that IONA could have taken to resolve the critical issues they faced could be,

- Have the product tested thoroughly and trial versions released before a final product, in order to identify and fix the issues which occur in real time

- If IDL was getting complicated to manage and sustain, they would have to start looking for alternatives and upgrade their products accordingly

- Time is a major constraint in real world, but a fix for an issue should not be given in short time without testing the effect the fix could have on rest of the product.

Although there are some gaps in my knowledge which I will try to address soon in the future,

- lack of in-depth knowledge about the technical aspects such as CORBA, IDL; so I might not be aware of their better alternatives

- preparations required for a company to give an intial public offering (IPO)

Reference: IONA 1 case (http://managingdesignanddevelopment.blogspot.ie/2012/10/iona-1-case.html)