f the need to combine inside and outside plant applications was an important driver of the project. 10.9.2 DMR and NetCracker DMR TELCOM360 is the telecom division of DMR Consulting. NetCracker Tech- nology is a vendor of network inventory management and provisioning solutions. The two companies partnered in order to allow DMR to provide NetCracker's inven- tory management and provisioning web-based products as a solution to clients' OSS requirements. The NetCracker suite of products enables service providers to automate and streamline network planning, design and inventory management and provisioning processes. NetCracker solutions integrate with network software including customer care, order management, trouble ticketing and activation. NetCracker's solutions give customers text and graphical views of logical and physical inventory. Information is provided to allow networks to be scaled quickly and cost-effectively, to speed the bringing of new services to market and to handle growing user demands. DMR's business and technology solutions framework, DMRframe360, automates telecom business processes. The framework integrates process-specific applications with business process automation to provide efficient and flexible systems for critical business methods. DMR's solutions include business architecture, CRM, billing and revenue management, network operations and assurance and enterprise technology. 10.10 Inventory Management for IP VPNs A recent inventory management solution for IP VPNs was presented by Dimension Data and several telecommunications companies participating in a TMF Catalyst project. 35 The aim of the IP VPN Management Catalyst project was to bring predictability to IP services over shared infrastructures and providing customer self-configuration of complex VPNs with evolving requirements. More complex sit- uations were catered for by using a multi-layer, multi-vendor and multi-service environment. In particular, the project used plug-and-play to accommodate diverse More specifically, the second 