stimonials. Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS The TMF conducts events to promote its studies and standards and these events are also a venue for service providers and system integrators to demo their products that comply with TMF standards. The TeleManagement Forum also offers certifi- cation. It certifies solutions that comply with its standards, where the solution could even be a simple implementation of an interface based on the definitions of TMF. It also certifies individuals based on an evaluation of their knowledge on specific standards. "Webinar" or online seminars are also conducted by TMF. People around the globe can register and listen to seminars on new concepts that need to be worked on in standardization and studies on implementation of existing stan- dards. Information about these seminars, hosted on the Web are published on the TMF Web site and also mailed to TMF members. "Catalyst Projects" are used by TMF to conduct studies and develop standards on emerging issues in telecom management. While team projects perform studies on base concepts, the catalyst project shows how the base concepts can be used to solve common, critical indus- try challenges. Web site: www.tmforum.org 7.4 DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) The DMTF is a standards organization started in 1992 with the name "Desktop Management Task Force." The name was later changed to "Distributed Management Task Force" with their standards mainly on management of enter- prise and Internet systems. The interoperability standards of DMTF help to reduce operational costs in a multivendor environment. DMTF is composed of three committees. They are: Technical committee: This committee is used to steer the work group creation, operation, and closure for developing standards and initiatives of DMTF. Interoperability committee: The work of this committee is handled by focus groups that work on providing additional data on interoperability in multi- vendor implementations based on DMTF resources. Marketing committee: The role of this commit