A manifestation of the Normalized Systems design principle Separation of Concerns, is the use of a messaging or integration bus to integrate the use of various messaging protocols. The theorem clearly forbids the direct transformation between two external protocols and therefore technologies and consequently tasks. The obvious solution is to use an internal reference format or open standard protocol.

For example, consider an integration project with N different messaging or protocol formats. Using direct transformations would require the creation of N(N-1)/2 connectors, while the selection of an internal reference format limits the number of transformations to N. The introduction of an additional protocol format would imply the need for N additional connectors in the case of direct transformations, while it requires only 1 or a single additional connector in the case of an integration bus.