The OsidProxyManager is the top level interface for all OSID proxy managers. A proxy manager accepts parameters to pass through end-user authentication credentials and other necessary request parameters in a server environment. Native applications should use an OsidManager to maintain a higher degree of interoperability by avoiding this coupling.

An OSID proxy manager is instantiated through the OsidRuntimeManager and represents an instance of a service. An OSID manager is responsible for defining clusters of interoperability within a service and creating sessions that generally correspond to these clusters, An application need only create a single OsidProxyManager per service and implementors must ensure the OsidProxyManager is thread-safe . The OsidSessions spawned from an OSID manager are dedicated to single processing threads. The OsidProxyManager defines methods in common throughout all OSID managers which implement this interface.