ort CLI and TL1 has been explained. Service Provisioning and Activation 6.1 Introduction Telecom service provisioning is the making available of resources necessary for a service by allocating those resources in a carrier's network. Service activation is the switching on - or "going live" - of the service. Service provisioning comprises a range of activities and these must be carried out in the correct sequence. Starting with an order received from a customer, the provisioning process involves a chain of events resulting in the service being activated at the network level and the billing system registering the new customer. When a customer requests a new service or a change to an existing service, several disparate databases must be changed and NEs (re) configured. The customer's order is decomposed into a set of components and that set matches some group of network resources. The identification and allocation of the necessary NEs which allow the network to provide the customer with the service requested require real-time infor- mation on the configuration and capacity of each NE involved. Some NEs may require work to be carried out on them before they can support the new service. Service provisioning is central to the service provider's business because a revenue- generating service is only available once it has been provisioned. Hence network man- agement staff must have at their disposal end-to-end monitoring and control of network configuration. The number of systems involved in services is increasing and systems in different enterprises are interdependent owing to mergers, takeovers, joint ventures and partnerships. Thus, manual - and even custom automated - intercon- nection is not practical owing to expense and complexity. Standardisation of inter- faces for interoperability is one of the few viable answers to this problem. Some of the products mentioned in this book make heavy use of interfaces based on standard technologies such as XML, Java and propriety - but open - APIs. The Telemanagement Forum (TMF)