Letter from the General Chairs

We are building on the success of previous NOMS and IM (International Symposium on Integrated Network Management) events, the premier technical conferences in the area of network and systems management and operations, jointly sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing).

NOMS will combine in-depth technical sessions and lively panels with a demo/exhibition area showing the latest network and service management technologies and products. It will provide you an excellent opportunity for meeting the world's top operations managers, developers and innovators, but more than that it will give you the perfect stage to voice your ideas and proposals in this crucially important area: we want you to be active participants and we are providing you the best "sparring partners" for moving your ideas forward.

In the spirit of this year symposium's theme, "Management Solutions for the New Communications World", we will be focusing on the major management issues for the emerging telecommunications environments, such as B2B solutions, 3rd Generation mobility, Telephony over IP, Optical Networking, Content Delivery Networks and component-based OSS.

Coming from the four corners around the planet and representing all different sectors of the tele-communications industry, top-level Keynote Speakers will daily open the technical sessions with their forward-looking views, and a Distinguished Experts panel will provide the grand closing session.

For the first time ever, the NOMS2002 exhibition, in addition to a number of Company booths, will also be featuring the TeleManagement Forum Catalysts. The TeleManagement Forum is a non-profit global organization that provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the management and operation of communications services, and its Catalyst projects are collaborative implementations that encourage and support the development of useable, commercial off the shelf (COTS) products needed to provide a sound business solution.

In order to help accommodate the relevant number of high quality submissions received by the Program Committee, we will be organizing regular sessions for peer- to-peer revised papers, in-depth presentations, poster sessions for interactive conversations between authors and attendees, "birds-of-a-feather" sessions for informal and ad-hoc discussions on the latest hot topics and panel sessions for lively debates on key controversial issues.

For the first time in its long history, this global symposium will be held in Europe, right at the heart of the beautiful city of Firenze. Hotels and major Italian art masterpieces will be within walking distance from the Conference Center, providing the ideal combination of professional and personal experiences. Many of these masterpieces are the result of painstaking cooperative work whose operation and management efforts are shining through the results we still enjoy today.

To all the colleagues that have experienced the previous NOMS/IM conferences and to all others who have not done so yet, a warm "arrivederci a Firenze": we are looking forward to seeing you all at NOMS2002.

Enrico Bagnasco and Veli Sahin - General Co-Chairs