egration is likely to remain among an IICs greatest business and technical challenges. The good news is that vendors are designing systems with more attention paid to integration and interaction with other systems. APIs are becoming more mature and capable, making integration somewhat easier, and certainly more able to create value. Furthermore, EAI tools are maturing, and more and more standard adapters and connectors that support the more popular EAI and OSS applications are becoming commercially available. Chapter 7 Supporting the Life of an OSS Integrated Platform Just when the IIC has survived the rigors of selection, implementation and integration, it faces another major challenge - maintaining the OSS platform. Caring for and feeding an OSS platform is no small task. Data centers and operations staff often become a large portion of an IIC's IT budget in later stages of deployment. IICs must institute release management processes to formalize configuration and integration changes. Application support, maintenance and upgrades are all critical, on-going tasks that require proper funding and knowledgeable staff. To ease this burden, many IICs seek ways to outsource their maintenance responsibility, and even consider hiring ASPs or other hosting providers as potential solutions. An IIC's ability to manage and maintain its OSS platform through new product or new geography rollouts, mergers and acquisitions or just routine support, can determine its operational success and will impact the bottom line. MOVING TO PRODUCTION After the OSS platform has been developed, and user acceptance testing (UAT) is nearing completion, there still is much to do. Preparing to launch the OSS into production involves numerous parallel activities, from data conversion to preparing the entire organization for the new operations and processes. Figure 1 provides an overview of these parallel activities and the complexity of the migration process. S. Jain et al., Broadband Infrastructure C BusinessEdge Solutions Inc. 2003 The Ultimate 