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.