CORBA is the acronym for Common Object Request Broker Architecture. It is an open source, vendor-independent architecture and infrastructure developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) to integrate enterprise applications across a distributed network. OMG is a nonprofit global software association that sets the distributed object computing standards. CORBA specifications provide guidelines for such integration applications, based on the way they want to interact, irrespective of the technology; hence, all kinds of technologies can implement these standards using their own technical implementations.

When two applications/systems in a distributed environment interact with each other, it is often true that there are quite a few unknowns between those applications/systems, including the technology they are developed in (such as Java/ PHP/ .NET), the base operating system they are running on (such as Windows/Linux), or system configuration (such as memory allocation). They communicate mostly with the help of each other's network address or through a naming service. Due to this, these applications end up with quite a few issues in integration, including content (message) mapping mismatches. As discussed in the socket/remote method invocation programming section, the publisher may not always know the receiver details well.

An application developed based on CORBA standards with standard Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), irrespective of the vendor that develops it, should be able to smoothly integrate and operate with another application developed based on CORBA standards through the same or different vendor. This rule is true even if the applications are run on different operating systems or servers or developed with a different technology and connected over the distributed network.