shing them can take a long time. The standards for ASRs and LSRs evolved over many years - timeframes not exactly congruent with "Internet Time." What has been an interesting development, and is perhaps the path to more rapid development of messaging standards, are the de facto standards that early DSL providers established. The most notable example came from Covad, which established a set of XML messages for pre-qualification and ordering used by the ISPs that retailed their services. Other providers adopted this set of XML messages, and some software vendors added specific capabilities to their applications to support it. It is conceivable that this approach can be applied and leveraged in other situations where emerging IICs have a strong wholesale/retail relationship, such as, optical transport providers delivering wholesale bandwidth to retailers, such as BLECs. INTEGRATION TECHNOLOGIES 12.1 Getting to the Data At a technical level, package integration is about capturing events and associated data, interpreting the events and updating the data in systems affected by those events. Package solution vendors have constructed their systems using a variety of techniques that change and improve over time. These styles and techniques map almost perfectly into the history of systems development. Typically, the style used is reflective of the best IT thinking at The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS the time the system was first developed. Thus, the method for capturing events and data varies by system and by system heritage. The earliest OSS packages were developed in a monolithic style using 3GL languages that accessed a central database. Many of these packages are still in use today and are best exemplified by the IBM AS/400 development style. This style consists of a relational database with RPG and/or Cobol programs and typically a character-oriented user interface. The next generation of packages exploited the Microsoft Windows, client/server paradigm with fat-clients, developed using Visual Basi