 seen likely that the OSS/BSS software market will evolve more in the direction of integrating and improving existing products instead of generating and innovating new software. On one hand, this seems to be driven by the market demand: as CSP's merge with each other, they need integration of their systems. Already at the present, integration services seem to form a great part of the Delphi Study OSS/BSS industry's revenue (cf. chapter on "OSS/BSS in the Vertical Software Market Evolution Model"). On the other hand, it may be thought that the existing variety of OSS/BSS software products covers all needs, and there is simply no use for any new kind of software - and thus the software development efforts will concentrate on improving existing software products. It must also be remembered that this state- ment was evaluated with the next 5 years in mind - in the longer run there might be room for new products also. MS10: The OSS/BSS software vendors expand and integrate their offering with others, either through mergers and acquisitions or through customer-specific tender coalitions. On one hand, this miniscenario presents a hypothesis about a consolidation of the industry. On the other hand, it is related to the aim of CSP's to be able to make their procurements from a minimum number of vendors (see chapter on "Vertical Integration due to Small Market Size and High Product Development & Integration Costs") and to increase system modularity (see chapter on "Vertical Integration due to Software Systems' Modularity"). The market analyses show that the number of vendors operating in the OSS/BSS markets has already been decreasing. The result of this statement considered as likely would anticipate a further reduction in the number of vendors in the nearby future. MS15: The telecom service providers are forced to adopt new organizational structures and hence also new software solutions due to the changing business environment and business models. On one hand, the current competitive environment puts pressures on CSP's t