There is growing interest and need within AT&T to accelerate use of object-oriented technology in application development. The promise of this technology is for smaller, more maintainable, and more easily extensible software products than can be produced with traditional approaches. However, the technology requires that software developers view the world and approach problems in a fundamentally different way. In this article, we discuss object-oriented design and object-oriented programming and their potential benefits. We also describe the status of object-oriented technology within AT&T and share experiences of some customers we have worked with and supported during the last five years.