been a very good experience and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Jithesh Sathyan Technical Architect Infosys Technologies Limited About the Author Jithesh Sathyan is a technical architect at Infosys Technologies Limited (NASDAQ: INFY). He is the sole inventor of the first granted patent of Infosys at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He has to his credit multiple international papers in the telecom domain, specifically on EMS, NMS, and OSS/BSS. He is a gold medalist in electronics and communication engineering. The author has been working on multiple projects involving design and develop- ment of telecom management solutions for a variety of telecom clients in OEM and service provider space. He has multiple filed patents in the telecom domain. Jithesh has published several white papers in standardizing forums, such as TeleManagement Forum that specializes in defining standards on telecom management. He is an active member of many telecom management standardizing forums. He has also contrib- uted a chapter entitled "Role of OSS/BSS in Success of IMS" in IMS Handbook: Concepts, Technologies, and Services published by CRC Press. ELEMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (EMS) Chapter 1 What Is EMS? This chapter is intended to provide the reader with a basic understanding of Element Management System. At the end of this chapter you will have a good understand- ing of what is a network element, the need for managing a network element, how an element management system fits into telecom architecture, and some of the major vendors involved in the development of EMS. 1.1 Introduction Industries are highly dependent on their networking services for day-to-day activi- ties from sending mail to conducting an audio/video conference. Keeping services running on the resource is synonymous with keeping the business running. Any service is offered by a process or set of processes running on some hardware. A set of hardware makes up the inventory required for keeping a service up and running. If the hardware goes d