While there is debate over the exact definition of an ESB, Iona cites its use in SOA.

"The way we think about it, we think of [an ESB] as a distributed infrastructure for developing and deploying and actually ultimately managing SOA," Bacon said.

In the area of data services, Artix 4.0 enables encapsulation of access to relational databases. Using the Eclipse interface, users can access any database via JDBC. "The idea is to graphically connect your Eclipse UI to a database," Bacon said.

Artix can run on mainframes. Version 4.0 features the ability for MQ clients to talk to the ESB on the mainframe and the ability to create PL/1code from WSDL, for service implementation.

Separately from Artix, Iona is involved in the open-source Celtix ESB project; Celtix is not as feature-rich as Artix, however, according to Iona.