Iona Technologies has lined up some telling buzzwords to publicise the first Iona World Europe users conference in Dublin on Monday, when the company will announce upcoming products and unveil new corporate strategy.

Along with liberal sprinklings of trendy terms such as "e-Business", "Internet commerce sites" and "enterprise portals", comes a new description of the company from chief executive Dr Chris Horn.

Iona, he says in a current press release, is now positioned "to be a leading vendor of enterprise e-Business technology". Overall, that's a critical new emphasis on e-words for the Irish company that has had considerable global success with "making software work together", as the company slogan goes.

Now, says Dr Horn, the company wants to make people realise that Iona also makes the software that makes the increasingly complex functions inside websites work together.

"It's an evolution of what we've been doing," says the chief executive, sitting at a small table in his modest office at Iona's glassy new buildings on Shelbourne Road in Ballsbridge. He hasn't lost the air of the Trinity academic he once was, speaking in precise, considered sentences, as if responding to student questions after a particularly difficult lecture. He manages, incongruously, to combine formality with a relaxed friendliness.

The switch in marketing perspective is central to the company as it positions itself in a difficult, competitive market against much bigger and more established players. While Iona may seem huge from these shores - one of the Republic's most prominent and high-octane success stories in spite of rough quarters earlier this year - the firm is dwarfed by market rivals like Oracle, Sun and IBM.

Iona makes middleware, "systems integration software" that lets different kinds of incompatible computers and computer systems link together and share information. Since most companies have a range of computers and computer systems - especially very big companies that buy new systems over time but need access to the data stored on their older systems - middleware has become very big business indeed.

The middleware concept fits right into the Web's varied world in which websites constantly need to do bigger and better things, and to do more of them at the same time. Complex processes that take place out of sight at a website's "back end", such as credit card transactions, database searches, share trading and order placement, need to be easily accessible to the website user at the "front end", the webpage seen on a browser.

According to Dr Horn, that's exactly where Iona plans to leap in, with software that lets website developers knit together a whole range of back-end software applications and attach them to a front end. The end result is an "enterprise portal" - a website that makes all those capabilities, known as the site's "functionality" in marketingspeak, smoothly and easily accessible (or "seamless") to the website user.

"We're very, very excited about the opportunities around so-called portal technologies," says Dr Horn. Are they going to offer a new product, then? "We're offering the solution," he says firmly, "which is a combination of product and services." Dr Horn cites the websites of American Airlines and CNN as working examples of Iona-built enterprise portals.

Services, ranging from consulting to technical support, already form 30 per cent of Iona's revenue stream, with the rest split between software sales in two areas: volume sales (typically, deals valued at a few thousand dollars) and enterprise sales (single deals of $250,000 or more to corporates).

On the product side, Iona has a new offering up its sleeve, for creating - what else? - enterprise portals. Dr Horn says the new product will enable developers to use a simple drag-and-drop method for building websites using Iona's system integration software.

Websites also can present a different, personalised front end to different users, he says. If it all works, it could revolutionise complex website development, since analysts say the software tools developers need for integrating systems are notoriously hard to use.

Analysts will be watching Iona's moves carefully since the company saw its market valuation plummet when it failed to meet Wall Street's expectations in the first quarter. Investors reacted nervously to Iona's second-quarter results as well. Dr Horn says the first-quarter slump came because "we didn't close as much business as we needed to", primarily high-end sales as the company geared towards the enterprise market.

"To do high-end sales, you need a high-end sales team," he says, but Iona was used to the more passive, telephone-and-email sales routine of volume sales. That weakness has been addressed, he says, but he stresses the continuing importance of low-end, volume sales, which he believes "seed" larger deals later on as clients expand.

Iona's latest results, out Wednesday, indicated an 18 per cent growth in revenue, but net income remains modest at $2.4 million, excluding a one time charge of $1.7 million.

Dr Horn is slightly defensive about the negative publicity that followed Iona's poor first-quarter performance: "Many technology companies miss a quarter, it's not an unusual thing." Nonetheless, after an astonishing 32 quarters of profitable growth and endless praise for the company, criticism, especially in the Irish media, must have been a slap in the face. "I didn't take what was said in the press personally, but I did take what went wrong personally," he says.

At the moment, Dr Horn is deeply into complementary acquisitions and partnerships: "A fair amount of my time is spent looking for opportunities." Early this year the company snapped up a small company with expertise in the versatile programming language Java.

Iona also inked an important licensing agreement with software giant EDS, whose technologies are incorporated into the drag-anddrop product. He's currently interested in companies with portal technologies, he says.

Iona's challenge now is to convince customers and investors that it can deliver on its shiny, new e-vision. While Dr Horn will undoubtedly have that concern at the front of his mind as he steps to the podium for his keynote address early Monday, there's plenty more to keep him awake at night - or rather, in the morning. Questions about Iona's performance haunt him "particularly when I wake up - are we fast enough, are we growing enough, are we under control," he says.

"The whole thing is execution - keeping the juggernaut on the road. You have to be paranoid, because this market changes so, so quickly." Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie