CORBA Orb Vendors

While CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is considered a legacy technology, several vendors continue to offer CORBA Object Request Brokers (ORBs) as of 2025. These solutions are maintained to support existing systems that rely on CORBA for distributed computing. Notable vendors include:

• Rocket Software: Provides enterprise-grade CORBA solutions such as Rocket® Orbix®, Rocket® VisiBroker®, and Rocket® OpenFusion®. These products offer features like high availability, replication, scalability, and integration capabilities to modernize legacy systems.  
• Micro Focus International plc: Offers Premier ORBs designed for seamless integration with CORBA modernization add-ons, facilitating the maintenance and enhancement of legacy CORBA applications.  
• Open Source Implementations: Projects like omniORB and MICO provide open-source CORBA implementations, enabling developers to maintain and develop CORBA-based applications without proprietary constraints.  

These offerings demonstrate that, despite its decline in popularity, CORBA remains in use within certain industries, and vendors continue to support and modernize CORBA-based systems.

As a rule, most of what we have seen to this point is basically required by the CORBA specification and conformance by the vendors is pretty standard. If a vendor wishes to provide a CORBA ORB, they must conform to the specification. But that does not guarantee API level interoperability - your CORBA code, written for one vendor's product, will not normally run on another ORB without some changes. But, a client using one vendor's ORB may interact with a server using a different ORB. It is important to remember that the interoperability is at the functional level, not the code level. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) that enables software components written in multiple computer languages and running on multiple computers to work together.
At this point, we have seen a large part of the core ORB and the basic building blocks of CORBA clients, their requests, CORBA servers, and their replies. This lesson introduces four of the major ORB vendors and their products.

• ObjectBroker
  Oracle WebLogic is probably best known as the owner and developer of TUXEDO, a widely used distributed transaction-processing software which they acquired from Novell in 1996. BEA is different from the other vendors in this list because they recently added CORBA functionality in 1997 when they purchased ObjectBroker from Digital Equipment Corporation. BEA has made a strategic decision to move into CORBA, because CORBA transactions have had little support from the vendors until recently. BEA is also adding CORBA support to TUXEDO.
• CORBAPlus Expersoft Corporation has been involved in distributed computing since their founding in 1989 and have been leaders in the CORBA field for years. Their ORB product, CORBAPlus is well respected and is focused on providing CORBA in large enterprise settings. Expersoft was late to offer a Java version of their product, which may have lost them market share over the last several years.
• Orbix Progress was formerly known as "IONA Technologies", originally based in Ireland but now with offices worldwide, is the leading CORBA vendor in the world. Their ORB product, Orbix, has been on the market since 1993 and offers an extremely wide selection of CORBA-based products on many different platforms and offers more CORBAservices implementations than any other vendor. IONA has forged a working relationship with Microsoft and has licensed COM to provide COM to CORBA integration solutions. IONA is particularly popular in Europe and the strength of their Orbix product will surely maintain leadership in the industry.