 network) resource control has been of enormous benefit to service providers.2 For a solution to improve order processing, it must communicate with order management, network-inventory management, provisioning and activation, and this is what TeleGea does. In the other direction, the Aplion's Network Virtuoso mul- tiservice-provisioning solution improves network provisioning by communicating with Emporium. The "point, click, deliver" enabled by Emporium relieves the serv- ice provider of having to know about router tables, packet analysis and so on. TeleGea hooks into the underlying OSS whereas Aplion allows customers to design or recon- figure a complex service. It is the hooking into the underlying OSS that allows rapid design or reconfiguration and end-to-end activation of a service. Other vendors who focus on linking order processes to other service and cus- tomer management systems downstream include Alopa Networks, Axiom Systems, Connexn Technologies, NightFire Software, Open Telecommunications North America, Orchestream, Vitria Technology and webMethods. Most of these vendors are making their workflow applications malleable by using Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE). For example, a software object might rep- resent a field in an order-entry form or it might represent a process or combination of processes. Object architectures allow non-technical staff at the service provider to create automated transaction processes by graphically arranging boxes. Such functionality allows a closer match to any carrier's particular workflow method. This lessens the impact of the justification commonly thrown up for a customised in-house solution: that there is no COTS OSS solution available that exactly fits the service provider's business processes. TeleGea allows the service provider to name a service plan, define the description that the customer will see, associate the service with specific equipment, features and service levels, and establish plans, features and pricing bundles for various mar- kets. Using this