nds of smaller customers. Importantly, automation minimized the costs of dealing with so many customers and provided a scalable operational framework, allowing rapid growth without degrading the services delivered to existing customers. In 2001, almost 90% of Capsule's orders were processed electronically, of which 70% were from consumer or small businesses. The electronic process is as follows. The initial order is turned into an account automatically and the data in the order are verified and then shared with service activation. When an order is generated, the system applies multiple processes to the information. These include credit scoring, third-party verification and feature com- parisons with the customer's previous incumbent carrier account. The order is then forwarded to the provisioning OSS. Network management, credit and collections, billing, customer care and all OSS software works together so that more than half of customer care is electronic. The company found that all of this reduced salary and administration costs even while its customer base and the quality of its services was increasing. The company achieved its results with three developers and a handful of system managers using Microsoft SQL Server, ASP Server and Visual Basic development software. Longer term plans called for porting the applications to a back office based on IBM Informix databases which allow real-time rating and billing of services. Capsule used a web-hosting architecture which separated out web, applications and database servers as separate tiers, and then divided the entire system into the functional groups: 1. order transactions 2. order status e-mails to customers 3. messaging to network provisioning systems. Online invoice and credit card payment services were introduced as part of the first functional group. The web "tier" when equipped with conditional access fire- walls allowed three tiers of front-end web servers: a "mass marketing" site for end- customers, a site for agents and other partners and an internal site 