 network and customer data may prove to be the most costly and risky aspect of the entire merger integration program. Technology integration will certainly be required. Corporate Internet, intranet and extranets will need to be consolidated, and data warehouses merged. OSS infrastructures will need to be rationalized and consolidated as well. Chapter 7 - Supporting the Life of an OSS Integrated Platform Using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies, and an Enterprise Process Integration (EPI) approach that takes integration from a technology initiative to a business process goal, it may be possible to integrate the acquired OSS platform within the existing OSS environment. Once work groups are consolidated and rationalized, the goal should be to have a common set of systems to support the newly merged enterprise. In areas where there is no overlap of functionality - such as management and monitoring of applications for an NSP acquiring an ASP - there may be systems from the acquired company that will remain as part of the OSS platform's end-state architecture in the post-merger environment. However, in the case of financial, customer relationship management (CRM), and billing systems, conversion will likely be required. The conversions in merger integration go beyond the typical data cleansing, data population, and testing efforts. Reconfiguration of the applications to support the newly acquired business - such as new equipment specifications, provisioning plans, product catalog elements and configuration rules, pricing/promotion definitions, general ledger codes, customer loyalty programs, and scripting rules - may be necessary. Managing an OSS merger will require as much, if not more, application configuration and integration as building an OSS platform from scratch. Thus, when a merger is announced, it is time for the OSS folks to start all over again. Chapter 8 Next-Generation OSS The world of OSS has changed dramatically over the past decade. The process of moving from monolithic, single-vendo