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But the rapid delivery of services has traditionally been hampered by the complexity of integrating business support systems (BSS) and operations support systems (OSS). BT Retail, part of the BT Group, delivers broadband and narrowband services to more than 2. 5 million business and consumer customers in the United Kingdom. It wanted to overcome the limitations of its existing systems and lower the barrier to introducing new services to small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) who use its broadband Internet service. Norman Street, Internet Application & Technology Programme Director, BT Retail International Operations, says, “SMEs rely very much on local people for their IT support. They often don’t have an IT department and don't have the sorts of services that a large company takes for granted. We wanted to offer them a virtual IT department, starting with hosted e-mail services, and expanding our value-added services from there. ” A review of the company's existing IT infrastructure revealed that it needed a more agile and flexible integration capability. It required a way of reducing the systems integration barriers to securely providing third-party services to its customers, and give them the means to access and administrate these services. In short, it needed a service delivery platform (SDP).