nterested in technologies which ease burdens in achieving seamless interoperability between OSS products from different vendors. Service provisioning may require work to be done, such as "soft" work as in the design of a circuit, or field work such as making a trip to the customer premises to install a piece of equipment. The less field work is involved, the faster and cheaper is the provisioning process. When all hardware is in place, service provisioning might merely involve marking a particular path, logical circuit or bandwidth as no longer available. Then, when another new service is to be provisioned, the required resource will be sought in the network. If the resource exists, then the only question is whether it is already allo- cated. Checking whether it is allocated - and, if it is not allocated, then allocating it - is a process that can ultimately be automated. The extent to which it can be automated depends on how accurate the inventory system is and how accessible it is to the provi- sioning software. Of course, if the necessary resources do not exist, then field work may have to be carried out or the customer might simply be informed that the service cannot be provided because the provider is "sold out" of the necessary resources. We often see service provisioning under the heading of service management, which, in turn, is closely related to service level agreement (SLA) management. Once we are in the domain of SLAs, we are in the domain of performance. This is why one will sometimes see alarm management, performance reporting, SLA management and service provisioning all in a single OSS solution. A service level agreement is a contractual definition of the relationship between a service provider and one of its customers. A static SLA is negotiated periodically 6 Service Provisioning and Activation (such as monthly or quarterly) whereas a dynamic SLA negotiates the service at the time a service is demanded. In a dynamic SLA, the request and the negotiation take place using a network signalling protoc