a company cares for and builds its relationship with its customers. CRM is generally a combination of people, systems, processes and philosophies. Customer self-help [CONCEPT]: The concept whereby an IIC places some amount of OSS access in the customers hands to allow him or her to place orders, open trouble tickets, pay bills, settle billing disputes, as well as other customer service functions. Data center: A physical location where a company maintains its application or hosting infrastructure. Often a large room or building with many racks of powerful computing and network equipment. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM): An optical networking multiplexing scheme that assigns traffic streams to individual wavelengths on an Glossary optical network. DWDM is capable of transmitting extremely high volumes of traffic and is generally applied to core optical networks. Dial-up off load solutions: A technique local voice service providers sometimes use to prevent dial-up Internet traffic from consuming voice switching resources. Often a packet switch is installed "in front of" a voice switch to detect, intercept and route traffic intended for the Internet. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL): The technology that enables high-capacity data transmissions over traditional copper telephone lines (or local loops). Domain Name System (DNS): A system for naming computers and network services that is organized into a hierarchy of domains. DNS naming is used in TCP/IP networks, such as the Internet, to locate computers and services through user-friendly names. DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer): The serving equipment that enables DSL traffic to be delivered over the local network. A DSLAM communicates with customers' DSL modems and aggregates their traffic for delivery to the Internet. eBusiness: Business that is conducted electronically. Also, a concept that connotes a high level of integration and automation amongst the various players in an industry to support business functions ranging from equipment sup