Book excerpt: Welcome to IM'97! We hope you had the opportunity to attend the Conference in beautiful San Diego. If that was the case, you will want to get back to these proceedings for further read ings and reflections. You'll find e-mail addresses of the main author of each paper, and you are surely encouraged to get in touch for further discussions. You can also take advantage of the CNOM (Committee on Network Operation and Management) web site where a virtual discus sion agora has been set up for IM'97 (URL: http://www.cselt.stet.it/CNOMWWWIIM97.html). At this site you will find a brief summary of discussions that took place in the various panels, and slides that accompanied some of the presentations--all courtesy of the participants. If you have not been to the Conference, leafing through these proceedings may give you food for thought. Hopefully, you will also be joining the virtual world on the web for discussions with authors and others who were at the Conference. At IM'97 the two worlds of computer networks and telecommunications systems came to gether, each proposing a view to management that stems from their own paradigms. Each world made clear the need for end-to-end management and, therefore, each one stepped into the oth er's field. We feel that there is no winner but a mutual enrichment. The time is ripe for integra tion and it is likely that the next Conference will bear its fruit.