Integrated communications have been largely associated with message-oriented middleware in collaborative distributed computing environments, both on small and large scales. Past experience has shown that monolithic architectures based on large executables are extremely difficult to maintain and very unresponsive to change. This paper aims at proposing an intelligent, object-oriented communications and messaging architecture based on interrelated business objects and components, designed to support business-to-business communication. The philosophy behind our approach has been to construct a scalable and flexible system architecture that enables the incorporation of new services at minimum effort. The framework allows for the implementation of reusable components, independently from the core architecture, that can be automatically discovered, configured and plugged-in to the system and used as “cartridges” on demand, according to the communication requirements of the application that will make use of the bearers linked to the system.