[omniORB] Which ORB for commercial use?

[bwallis]

Our company is commencing a process of updating the ORB used in our main
product. Currently it is using an old version of Orbix 2000 (1.2.3). Part of 
the upgrade exercise is to assess the impact/risk/cost, and in doing so we 
need to consider alternate ORBs. 

Some years ago when we moved from a BOA to POA orb I did an initial port
of our software to run on TAO, and as a prototype exercise it was quite 
successful. In the process I was also able to help out with the smart client 
proxy implementation in TAO as it was required in our product at the time.  
For some (maybe no longer relevant) commercial reasons, we released the 
product using IONAs Orbix 2000 orb. 

We are embarking on an evaluation of four candidate orbs, TAO, Mico, omniORB 
and Orbix 6.x. The two core reasons given for choosing orbix last time were 
concerns about support and customer perception of our choice of middleware. 

So, the reason for this message is I would like to get any opinions,
either on list or off, about the quality of the commercial support offered 
by Apasphere. 

If this is not a suitable question for this list then OK, just ignore
it, but it would be nice to get some real world experiences to include in 
the evaluation report we are putting together. Off list responses will be
kept confidential of course. 

(I am asking the same question on the TAO and Mico lists) 

thanks,
brian...