d to be built into the bridge to coordinate between the two catalogs and maintain a synchronized view. This meant maintaining product catalogs in three places - the trade-off for achieving valuable flow-through. Tools and utilities had to be added to the integration bridge to allow non-programmers to add product definitions into the integration bridge. The good news for IICs is that this example shows that there can be low cost ways of doing integration without EAI, but without eliminating EAI as a future consideration. 18.3 Order Management to Network Activation Company: DSL provider serving residential and business customers in tier- two and -three cities. Goal: Flow a work task from an order management/provisioning/inventory package to automatically select and provision DSLAM ports at the appropriate central office. Automatically provision ATM path (A to Z) across the network backbone to a selected ISP. Technology: Leading EAI technology and ATM activation and configuration system. Challenges: Maintaining synchronization between the network inventory database and the physical network. Limitations on inventory API prevented northbound population of data. Scenario: The DSL provider was manually provisioning permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) across its ATM network. The IIC offers DSL service, but allows freedom of ISP choice. The activation system could automatically provision the PVCs. The first problem was integrating it into the EAI backbone because a connector did not exist between the activation application and the EAI system. The DSL provider made a wise move and required the activation package vendor to agree to build and maintain the required connector before it would sign a deal. The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS With the connector in place, the southbound interface to the activation system, i.e. data flowing from the provisioning application down to the activation system, worked fine. Service could be activated on the network with a high level of automation. The problem was that the 