blems, and not be as concerned with how problems are solved for customers with a completely different business model. The OSS market is beginning to overlap with the enterprise network software market. IP provisioning and activation systems, QoS policy servers and VPN devices are good examples of where some of the overlap is occurring. The trick to this market segment is identifying the enterprise vendors that can handle IIC network demands. Can their applications support large networks? Do they provide greater than 99 percent reliability? What is the greatest number of nodes, users, or transactions the application has ever supported in production? There is no guarantee that an application that works well for an enterprise network will be functional, reliable or scalable in an IIC network environment. A number of vendors that serve horizontal functions, such as accounting, customer care, database management, and enterprise planning, have entered the OSS market. The vendors have made minor alterations to their products to tailor them to IICs, but for the most part, these applications are not specific to the IIC vertical market. The applications, however, do support necessary functions, provide IIC's with some strong vendors from which to choose, and allow IICs to benefit from a broader user community than those to which more IIC specific OSS packages are exposed. The main concerns for these horizontal applications is how well they can integrate into an OSS environment, how they can be configured to the IIC's processes, and how closely the vendor is willing to work with the IIC and understand its requirements. The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS UNDERSTANDING VENDOR SOLUTIONS One common factor of all OSS vendors is that they must differentiate to compete. Vendors tend to differentiate in two main areas: functionality and integration options. Beyond including the functions the software is designed to carry out, functionality includes how the software is implemented and maintained. For example, some