and Vitria. Additional Reading 1. Kundan Misra. OSS for Telecom Networks: An Introduction to Network Management. New York: Springer, 2004. 2. Dominik Kuropka, Peter Troger, Steffen Staab, and Mathias Weske, eds. Semantic Service Provisioning. New York: Springer, 2008. 3. Christian Gronroos. Service Management and Marketing: Customer Management in Service Competition. 3rd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons., 2007. Benoit Claise and Ralf Wolter. Network Management: Accounting and Performance Strategies (Networking Technology). Indianapolis, IN: Cisco Press, 2007. 5. Kornel Terplan. OSS Essentials: Support System Solutions for Service Providers. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. Chapter 21 NGOSS This chapter is about TeleManagement Forum's (TMF) New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS). The chapter is intended to give the reader a basic understanding of NGOSS concepts and life cycle. This author suggests reading TeleManagemet Forum publications for a deep understanding of NGOSS concepts and components. 21.1 Introduction Let us start by discussing why TMF introduced NGOSS. The telecom industry was changing rapidly both from technical and business perspectives. On the tech- nical front, the focus shifted from simple voice service to data services, which was required on an IP-based platform as against the previous circuit platform. Also the focus shifted from a fixed to wireless network and then to convergence of both fixed and mobile termed FMC (fixed mobile convergence). On the business front, prices were falling due to competition and there was a demand for higher return on investments. This new landscape brought in different needs for each of the tele- com players. The suppliers wanted to have standard interfaces for interaction to reduce the integration costs and ensure that there is a higher chance for operators to buy a product that will easily integrate and interoperate with other products. The operators wanted to reduce service life cycle and achieve minimal time to market by reducing integration t