 and Far East. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied for the analysis. The book is intended to decision makers in the CSP business as well as to those developing software for this rapidly evolving business sector. The aim is to do research that would satisfy academic standards while providing help in practical business problems for CSPs and software developers, i.e., for companies that are shaping the future of communications and sometimes found in one and the same enterprise. Seldom has any business been in such turmoil as the CSP business is today. This book opens up the possibility to approach analytically and factually the unknowns of the future of this business. For this purpose, Chap.4 presents a P. Tyrväinen (X) Department of Computer Science and IS, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: Pasi.Tyrvainen@jyu.fr P. Tyrväinen and O. Mazhelis (eds.), Vertical Software Industry Evolution, Contributions to Management Science, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7908-2352-3_1, C Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 P. Tyrväinen and M. Pulkkinen practical toolkit for managers for fast examination of the directions of the OSS/BSS software market. This is followed by a description about how this methodology was developed and instructions on how to apply the methods for another vertical software market. 2 Background and Goals The content of this book is mainly based on the research findings produced in an academia-industry collaboration project titled Software Market Analysis - Case Telecom Operator Products (SmarTop) in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The project was launched with the aim to analyze the status and evolution of a target vertical software industry. The target software industry chosen was software deployed by communications service providers (CSP). Due to convergence of communication services, the scope included fixed line, broadband, IP-TV, virtual and mobile communication service providers. The practical goal of the proje