 to manage those services. Human intervention can only be necessary when exceptional situations arise. Hence it is easy to see that OSS software will play a key and increasing role in driving revenue for telecom service providers in the future. Keith Willits, Founder of the Telemanagement Forum, said at the 2002 Tele- management World Conference in Nice that the telecom industry is increasingly like the automobile industry. The telecom industry is highly automated and oper- ational control is becoming more centralised. To achieve efficiency, scalability and cost control, management and control of operations is being delegated as much as possible to OSS software. What is this OSS software? What does it look like? What can it do? What do its users do all day? How can it be extended? We seek to de-mystify OSS software in this book by showing readers what it is all about. We shall also describe and discuss some of the goings-on amongst OSS software vendors, such as partnerships, evolution of products and the basic features of an array of OSS products. A common refrain in the OSS industry is that "there are no green fields!" This means that networks are never built from scratch but, rather, incrementally evolve over many years. Correspondingly, their management systems must also incremen- tally evolve and accumulate. The result is that most telecom service providers have a multiplicity of management systems which do not talk to each other. There is a need for humans to manually take information from one system to another ("swivel- chair integration"). This raises the issues of end-to-end management and unified management. K. Misra et al. (eds.), OSS for Telecom Networks © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2004 OSS for Telecom Networks 1.1 End-to-end Management and Unified Management End-to-end management is the ability of a system to manage all steps of a process, starting with the customer order, continuing through to activation of the service, regular billing of the service and termination of the service. Many service 