A wet plant manager (WPM) platform, in accordance with the present disclosure, supports management of Smart Undersea Network Elements (SUNEs) (110-1, 110-2... 110-N) by providing an abstracted view ofthe same to higher level network management functions within an optical communication system. The communication system can include an optical cable system (100) extending between two or more cable landing stations (CLSs). Each CLS (CLS1, CLS2) may execute a respective instance of a WPM platform service, with the collective WPM platform performing self-coordination such that only one instance of aWPM service is "active" at any given time. The active WPM service supports a plurality of network topologies architected around SUNEs (110-1, 110-2... 110-N) and "bridges" them such that requests tocommunicate with a particular SUNE (110-1, 110-2... 110-N) get handled in a transparent manner without the requesters specific knowledge of which command/response (CR) telemetry path (112-1, 112-2) was utilized to satisfy the request.