The objective of the Management Services Interface Working Group is to define a management services interface by which management applications may obtain access to a heterogeneous, multi-vendor, multi-protocol set of manageable objects. The service interface is intended to support management protocols and models defined by industry and international standards bodies. As this is an Internet Engineering Task Force Working Group, the natural focus is on current and future network management protocols and models used in the Internet. However, the interface being defined is expected to be sufficiently flexible and extensible to allow support for other protocols and other classes of manageable objects. The anticipated list of protocols includes Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), OSI Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP), CMIP Over TCP (CMOT), Manufacturing Automation Protocol and Technical Office Protocol CMIP (MAP/TOP CMIP) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC).