Existing services require assurable end-to-end quality of service, security and reliability constraints. Therefore, the networks involved in the transport of the data must cooperate to satisfy those constraints. In a next generation Internet, each of those networks may be managed by different entities. Furthermore, their policies and service level agreements (SLAs) will differ, as well as the autonomic management systems controlling them. In this context, we in the Autonomic Internet (AutoI) consortium propose the Orchestration Plane (OP), which promotes the interaction among different Autonomic Management Systems (AMSs). The OP mediates the communication and negotiation among AMSs, ensuring that their SLAs and policies meet the requirements needed for the provisioning of the services. It also simplifies the federation of domains and the distribution of new services in virtualised network environments.