Enterprise network executives face several challenges in successfully migrating to advanced IP services. The choices facing the network executive today tend to fall into two solutions: one, build a management solution, or two, outsource this work to a third party.

This paper will explore the problems inherent in an overlay management approach and describe a new approach that allows for the management of the wide-area network to be not only offered as a service, but actually embedded in the network itself, resulting in several incremental benefits to the enterprise.