On the side of the managing systems, management platforms relying on standardized architectures are considered today as a sound basis for presenting heterogeneous resources in a uniform way to network operators. In order to reduce their complexity and the resulting high hardware requirements, a first step consists of dividing the management platform and the management applications running on top of it into smaller pieces.
Those smaller parts can either be encapsulated or re-implemented in an object-oriented manner; they are then interconnected by means of an ORB. Note that the use of an ORB needs not to be visible outside of the managing system; it is therefore possible to use management protocols like SNMP or CMIP for exchanging information with managed systems. This can be considered as an intermediate step towards a purely CORBA-based management solution. The Tivoli Management Environment [15] is an example of a commercial management implementation built according to this idea.