 the eTOM framework. 3.2 OSS/BSS Market Volume In order to study the telecom software market, we use commercial data collected by Dittberner Associates, Inc. (for the description of the data used, the reader is referred to Section "Data Sources Used"). The total volume of the OSS/BSS market in 2006 was nearly 30 billion USD. Out of the total number of companies in the market, one-third are ICT service providers that produce 55% of the total revenues. Overall, the OSS/BSS vendors received 64% of their revenue from services and Overview of Telecom Operator Software Market Fulfilment Assurance Billing Customer 1. CRM, Call center, Order Management Management 4. Billing (Offline) Service 5. Fraud Mgt.& 2. Network Order Management 3. Service Quality Mgt. Revenue Assurance Management 6. Interconnect Billing 9. Fault Management Resource 8. Inventory, Numbering, 7. Provisioning 10. Performance Mgt. 12. Mediation 13. Charging Management Discovery & (realtime) Activation 11. Remote Testing & Monitoring Fig. 1 OSS/BSS market segments on top of the eTOM operations process group 36% from software products. The segments under the vertical process group billing have the biggest volume of the software product segments with close to 6.3 billion USD, followed by the segments under assurance (3.7 billion USD), fulfilment (1.5 billion USD) and the customer relationship management (0.85 billion USD) spanning horizontally at the customer interface shown in Fig. 1. The segment- specific total revenues are listed in Table 1 below. In 2006, the largest geographical market for OSS/BSS was in North America (46% of the total market), although the market had not grown there at all compared to year 2000. In contrast, over this 6-year-period the OSS/BSS market had grown in EMEA over 40% (35% of total), in Asia Pacific over 64% (14% of total), and in Latin America over 93% (5% of total). 3.3 OSS/BSS Market Scope Strategies The competition in the OSS/BSS market can be observed through strategies adopted by a software vendor with respect to its m