of application packages that allow them to do business. These core applications, the "long poles in the S. Jain et al., Broadband Infrastructure BusinessEdge Solutions Inc. 2003 The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS tent," generally provide the ability to take orders, bill for services and monitor and activate network services. In this initial phase, integration is achieved via manual processes, i.e. re-keying data among multiple applications. This situation is tenable for only a short period of time. As the customer base increases, increasing the staff that performs the manual integration is the only way to scale systems and processes. In other cases, integration becomes necessary to resolve the addition of new product lines or to manage the migration from a legacy base to a new OSS. Regardless of the starting point, integration is required to achieve a set of specific business objectives, the most common of which are described below. 1.1 Order Flow-Through IICs pursue flow-through ordering capabilities to manage the interactions among applications for order-processing workflow. This requires sequential and parallel activities to be coordinated across multiple systems, including sales force automation, order entry, order management, provisioning, service activation, interconnect gateway and billing. The overall goal is to originate an order as a result of the sales process, and to flow that order through the tasks and applications required to provision and activate the services requested. Ultimately, the integration flow will notify the billing system of order completion SO that the appropriate billing will occur. 1.2 Service Assurance Flow-Through This objective can be divided into two parts. First, the objective is to detect a network fault and correlate the fault to those customers affected by the problem. For these customers, trouble tickets are automatically generated to notify them pro-actively and to track the resolution. In our example, it is also necessary to calculate and apply credits 