as a big problem in the OSS industry. Indeed, this was specifically addressed in the keynote speech at the Telemanagement World Conference in Nice in 2002. The provisioning framework presented here provides a framework and tools for building vendor-specific and multi-vendor provisioning applications. It meets the needs of many equipment vendors and other equipment providers for provisioning and configuration of their devices in a multi-vendor network. It enables service providers and system integrators rapidly to customise provisioning capabilities and add new support for multi-vendor networks. It supports a variety of interfaces to the network elements and element management systems via a multi-protocol con- figuration engine which supports the SNMP, TL1 and CLI/Telnet management pro- tocols. It is extensible, allowing new support to be plugged in, including support proprietary protocols. Support for CORBA, Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and XML interfaces to southbound element managers and devices was added in recent years. This allows connectivity with new element managers and network elements. The open provisioning framework presented here simplifies the integration of provisioning applications. Many different applications are needed for provisioning, depending on the needs of the domain or application. For example, OSS products recently made support for customer self-provisioning available. It is a goal of the pro- visioning framework that it be easily extensible to include software such as customer self-provisioning interfaces and any module with new, specialist functionality. The provisioning framework seeks to minimise the development and integration effort needed to develop a system which can provision multi-vendor networks. Two key aspects of the framework provide these benefits: 1. An XML service provisioning template makes building solutions much simpler, and the multi-protocol configuration engine means that devices supporting only one management protocol can be provisioned. 2. An extensible server e