The integration of Artix Data Services within pControl's Data Manager module extends pControl's 'out of the box' ability to support the broadest set of financial messaging standards. IONA is a recognised specialist in financial messaging for SWIFT, SWIFT Net Funds, and FIX.

Milestone Group CEO Geoff Hodge said, "This initiative will allow us to deliver a richer and more cost effective implementation experience for clients making broader use of standard message formats and protocols. An attraction of IONA's Artix Data Services is its established use and acceptance by blue chip global financial institutions for mission critical trading and payment applications. The open architecture of IONA's technology is very compatible with pControl's SOA and platform independent design."

Milestone Group is focussed on the delivery of true end-to-end processing within and across corporate boundaries and sees sophisticated message handling across a broad range of formats and transports as key to delivering efficiencies in business critical functions including fund trading, price distribution and the like. The capability also compliments pControl's role in the automation and effective management of outsource relationships between fund managers and custodians/administrators.

Artix Data Services offers the broadest support for financial services standards, message types and validation rules, including SWIFT, SEPA, FpML, TWIST, ISO 20022, CREST and FIX, with the ability to model any data format for complete compliance. Artix ESB is IONA's multi-platform and multi-protocol integration solution that reliably connects diverse application endpoints without an expensive and cumbersome centralised server.

"Compliance with multiple and frequently changing business-critical messaging and technology standards is a challenge for any financial services organisation and can very quickly drain the resources of in-house development teams," said Peter Zotto, CEO, IONA Technologies. "Companies such as Milestone Group understand the benefit of offering their customers an 'out of the box' data validation and processing solution that addresses the challenges of today's highly regulated financial services environment. We look forward to working with Milestone Group to deliver world leading business application and integration solutions to our joint customers."

Milestone Group will deploy Artix Data Services and Artix ESB in the next release of pControl, scheduled for roll-out in the second quarter of 2008.