Jacob, BruceMudge, TrevorThis paper describes a commercial software and hardware platform for telecommunications and multimedia processing. The software architecture loosely follows the CORBA and ODP standards of distributed computing and supports a number of application types on different hardware configurations. This paper is the result of lessons learned in the process of designing, building, and modifying an industrial telecommunications platform. In particular, the use of the trading function in the design of the system led to such benefits as support for the dynamic evolution of the system, the ability to dynamically add services and data types to a running system, support for heterogeneous systems, and a simple design performing well enough to handle traffic in excess of 40,000 busy-hour calls.en-USindustrial telecommunicationsmultimedia processingCORBAODPArticle