] I an not sure if it is appropriate to ask this here, but i will anyway!
Only if you use it in North America 
] Is there a network mamangement platform of choice fo r building a NOC. We are in the process of designing our noc from the groud up and would appriechite some input. We rare leaning twards Openview, but would like comments from others.
We started off using SNMXmon, moved to Sun Net Manager, and then
to tkined. Along the way we've built several perl scripts that
monitor the network and send off alarms and pages if/when anything
breaks.
A lot of folks use HPOV, I've been impressed w/ Cabletron's
Spectrum, but from our perspective, they're not built all that
well for >500 node wans.
Tkined has increased for the folks w/ in-house talent to support
and modify, and I'd say HPOV has been the standard for the folks
that started off "right".
-alan