Minimum interruption of service when plug-in is applied. Instead of re-building their application to take advantage of changes in transports, or infrastructure components, customers can just briefly stop the server and start server again. This can be done without interrupting the business. The analogy is a pit-stop in formula one racing as opposed to taking your car off the road, taking your car apart and putting it together again from scratch. One platform, One vendor IONA provides one platform infrastructure for heterogeneous computing environments.
Servers can react to clients communicating in many different protocols.
The plug-ins can be at an application level, a system level, or a transport level. Firstly, plug-ins allow you to develop alternate transports for the ORB whereas portable interceptors do not support this. Secondly, you can install a plug-in by making a simple change to a configuration file, while portable interceptors must be installed by a change to application code. When developing an application, you would most likely use the local log stream, which logs to standard output or to a file. However in a deployed system you might want to use the system log stream which logs to the operating system's logging service.