MICO implements the CORBA standard. Since its foundation in December 1996, MICO has become a mature, very stable, fully-compliant implementation of the CORBA standard. 

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) was first published in 1990 by the Object Management Group (OMG), a non-profit organisation that was founded in 1989 to integrate distributed applications based on a variety of existing technologies. CORBA standardises interfaces and semantics for object-oriented middleware. It includes a specification for the Object Request Broker (ORB), a software library with standardised CORBA object interfaces that allows clients and targets to communicate with each other across a network in a well-defined way. In addition, CORBA automatically applies a range of useful services to communications. After the ORB is initialised, all CORBA objects can be invoked by applications like local software objects.

Resulting from its academic origin at the University of Frankfurt, the MICO implementation has a clear and modular design even for implementation internals to ensure easy extensibility. it only relies on C++, the standard Unix API and non-proprietary libraries. In line with that, MICO should only make use of widely available, non-proprietary tools.

The current version of MICO includes the following features:

• IDL to C++ mapping
• Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII)
• Dynamic Skeleton Interface (DSI)
• graphical Interface Repository browser that allows you to invoke arbitrary methods on arbitrary interfaces
• Interface Repository (IR)
• IIOP as native protocol (ORB prepared for multiprotocol support)
• Portable Object Adapter (POA)
• Objects by Value (OBV)
• CORBA Components (CCM)
• Support for using MICO from within X11 applications (Xt, Qt, and Gtk) and Tcl/Tk
• Dynamic Any
• Interceptors (deprecated feature)
• Portable Interceptors (PI)
• Support for secure communication and authentication using SSL
• Support for nested method invocations
• Any offers an interface for inserting and extracting constructed types that were not known at compile time
• Full BOA implementation (deprecated feature), including all activation modes, support for object migration and the implementation repository
• BOA can load object implementations into clients at runtime using loadable modules
• Multi-threading (MT): support for thread-pool and thread-per-connection concurrency models
• CORBA Services:
  • Interoperable Naming service
  • Trading service
  • Event service
  • Relationship service
  • Property service
  • Time service
  • Security service

The name MICO stands for “MICO Is CORBA” (inspired by the acronym GNU).

ObjectSecurity provides technical support, as well as development and consulting services for MICO. ObjectSecurity is the official maintainer of the MICO project and the main contributor since 2000. ObjectSecurity's highly skilled specialists have many years of experience in R&D, consulting, and support in the areas of MICO, CORBA in general, CORBA security, CORBA Components (and security), and distributed systems. Therefore they are ideally suited for integrating MICO with your IT infrastructure and applications to produce a reliable, secure, and stable system.