on, such as IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and recently service delivery platforms (SDP) and service delivery frameworks (SDF). The goal of service delivery platforms is to create a unified environment for creating new services and for executing them regardless of the network technology used. The service delivery frameworks are not as ambitious and do not offer a uniform environment; rather they offer a set of standards, principles, and policies guiding the creation and management of services throughout their lifecycle (in essence, the SDF is an embedded part of a unified SDP). This bold idea has not been realized to a large extent yet, and thus the term service creation framework is used more widely to describe a set of primitive supporting services (billing, activation etc.) which can be activated as a part of a new customer service from a service creation / execution tools using a backplane or middleware software. In any case, there would be a market for SDP/SDF environments if implementing such would be feasible. If such environment would appear, it could form a dominant design to which all other OSS/BSS software components would have to integrate. L. Frank et al. During the SmarTop project, the interviewed mid-sized communication service providers indicated that their companies are concentrating their software acquisitions on only few, larger providers, which can offer lower administrative and integration costs. Meanwhile the software vendors aim to expand their range of supply to meet the demand, through introducing new product lines and corporate acquisitions. These can be seen as signals reflecting the consolidation of the telecom software market, and the notion motivates examining the current phase of the market as well as the likely subsequent developments. In the following, the structure and the structural changes of the telecom software industry are analyzed. The aim is to analyze the evolution of the telecom software industry following the theories and models of industry evolution. 2 OSS/BSS in Genera