supply chain. From a fundamental point of view, OSS is the business backbone for IIC eBusiness. It touches all transactions, communications, coordination, sales, service creation and delivery and customer contact. Where eBusiness for many industries means posting some information on a Web site and accepting orders through it, for IICs the complexity runs much deeper. OSS includes all of the complex systems that must be brought together as the basis for an IIC's operations, and which must allow a proactive, cooperative and competitive business environment among many integrated IICs. The OSS platform's primary eBusiness component is the Web portal. From a pure OSS perspective, the Web portal can provide access to product configuration, order pre-qualification data, ordering processes, trouble ticketing, customer profile modifications, on-demand service changes, SLA measurements and more. It is the user interface to customers and partners, be it wholesale, point-of-sale, retail, business or residential. The type of users and their specific needs determine how deep into the OSS chain the portal will allow them to go. Another group that might fall under this category are OSS ASPs and others that provide outsource-based OSS services. We discussed these IICs in Chapter 1. Their role in the supply chain is as a provider of OSS services, but they also provide an interesting example of an IIC that is also an eBusiness. Wholesalers. In most cases, wholesalers are the ones enabling competition, creating new markets, and driving eBusiness' adoption in the IIC marketplace. Wholesale markets have developed for just about every service out there, in the sense that almost everything is available for resale. More sophisticated markets have developed for DSL services, excess bandwidth, long-distance minutes, high-capacity Internet access and mobile The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS services. Wholesalers' eBusiness capability is critical to their customers' ability to create services from unbundled components. Wh