lbox for OSS/BSS Market Analysis availability of support services, and size of customer base. Independent software vendors would have to consider joining it or a comparable alliance. Metrics: Share of typical OSS/BSS functionality covered by an SDP. Reduction of effort needed to implement a new service with an SDP (order of magnitude reduction for 80% of new services). Share of CSPs whose requirements an SDP product covers (reaching 15% = 100). Number of customers of an SDP out of CSPs (reaching critical mass with 15% of CSPs equaling to about 100 CSPs). 2.2.3 MS7: IT Service Providers Dominate with NGOSS Customizations Description: IT service providers (such as, e.g., Accenture) will dominate the OSS/ BSS market with customized offering, based on NGOSS specifications. Reasoning: An invasion by large software vendors into the OSS/BSS markets has already started. So far these large software companies have not succeeded in diminishing the position of OSS/BSS specific vendors and the experts do not see this as a likely evolution within the next five years. This seems to be mainly due to limited domain knowledge, although they have a large pool of engineers with knowledge of a large number of network technologies. Implications: If IT service providers were able to standardize the OSS/BSS processes they would have better competitive position due to their capability to balance the engineering load across large resource pools that have a big impact on the OSS/BSS industry. Metrics: Market share of IT service houses VS. market share of product-based ISVs on OSS/BSS market. 2.2.4 MS12: Open Source Software Dominance Description: Open source software is sufficient for the telecom service providers, leaving no market for commercial OSS/BSS software products. Reasoning: Open source software is currently and in the next five years seen as not sufficient for all the OSS/BSS needs by a CSP. If, however, open source software systems were to exist and able to reliably provide all the functionalities required by the CSP's, there w