Irish software company Iona Technologies will launch a number of new open source products next week. This latest range of software - under the FUSE brand - will help companies to incorporate open source technology into SOA (service oriented architecture) deployments.

With open source beginning to make its presence felt in areas such as education, government and the corporate sector, the timing of Iona's announcement comes as the open source agenda gains considerable momentum.

Larry Alston, vice-president of corporate strategy at Iona, said open source was very important to the company because it had become a significant trend and was something that companies such as Iona had to watch.

Mr Alston said enterprises were embracing open source as a platform not just for the low barriers to entry, such as cost, but because they have the ability to influence how the software is developed in a way they can't with traditional closed source products and services.

"The announcements we're making centre around open source projects that are wrapped with documentation and support offerings so companies can download them and get enterprise and professional support for them."

Iona is one of the few software companies that manufactures open and closed source products. According to Mr Alston both platforms can be mixed and he believes it is the direction software will probably be heading in the future. He said the company sees the market moving towards using open and closed source products to achieve their goals.

"So we're embracing that change instead of fighting it. Customers can choose our closed or open source products or both. We think this is important for Iona because open source is here to stay."

Mr Alston said open source was a trend happening in the grass roots much like the internet did. One of the big problems for Iona was how to embrace that without cannibalising its product line and revenue streams.

"We believe the solution to that is to do what we're doing. Our engineers are participating in these open source communities, which gives us the ability to offer support services to our enterprise customers. They are used to and expect that sort of support and hence we're making money from it."

Iona's long-term goals and strategies will be to evolve the open source products and add to their capabilities in a manner similar to their closed source counterparts. "Our plans are very typical of what you'd see a company do with a product line," said Mr Alston.

Some of open source's critics such as Microsoft often claim the cost of support and service would ultimately increase the total cost of ownership of the product more so than a licensed closed source offering. Mr Alston suggested that the weight of evidence would not support this claim.

And while it was true that open source is not free the overall savings are greater. "The cost structure is different in open source. Typically how you would charge for support in a traditional vendor model would be a percentage of the licence fee. As open source has no licence fees we usually charge for support based on the size of the project and that determines what the contract will cost.

"From our perspective we are unique in having a dual model which is very important to us because we're heading for a mixed model world."