I would be remiss to send you out into the CORBA world without a few cautionary notes:
CORBA Services
There are very few widely available CORBA Service implementations outside of the Naming and Event services. Some of these services are under specified, allowing vendors to create incompatible solutions. Be prepared to do some research before purchasing a product, lest you get locked into a vendor's proprietary solution.
Firewalls
CORBA communications tend to be very dynamic, making it very difficult to filter hostile from friendly communications. You will need a CORBA/IIOP-aware firewall if you want to safely communicate with the outside world.
Source Code Portability
Currently, source code developed using one vendor's product is not truly portable to another vendor's product. The OMG is trying to tackle this issue with its ORB Portability efforts (ftp://ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/orbos/97-05-15.pdf).
Development, Debugging & Metrics
There are few user-friendly tools for CORBA development and debugging. There are even fewer tools that allow you to monitor and collect statistics on distributed systems (especially in heterogeneous environments). Finding system bottlenecks becomes much more difficult in a distributed environment.
DCOM
DCOM is Microsoft's solution for distributed computing and it's hard not to imagine it becoming a serious CORBA contender. Expect Microsoft to develop the tools for DCOM that CORBA lacks. o