s O. Martikainen Nokia Ericsson Motorola Qualcomm Interdigital Fig. 5 Major essential GSM patent technology groups The patent portfolios and the SIM-card based vertical integration have been the major features preventing horizontal development in mobile services. The horizon- tal disruptive points and the corresponding incumbent vertical strategies for preventing disruptive developments in mobile services are displayed in Fig. 3. The essential GSM patents have been analyzed based on the ETSI essential patents database (ETSI 2005) and their total numbers with respect to patent owners are presented in Fig. 4. The essential GSM patents were then grouped to different technology areas and the patent distribution by the number of patents is depicted in Fig. 5. From the figure we can see that the largest essential GSM patent areas are in system, radio, codec and speech processing technologies, each with hundreds of patents. The SIM-card area has only some tens of patents. In summary, the current development in the telecommunications domain can be characterized by (1) the proliferation of IP-based traffic, and (2) gradual obsolete- ness of the patent portfolios and the diminishing necessity for SIM-cards. As a result, the barriers for horizontal developments are dissolving, and, in the near future, the vertical service pipes are expected to yield to the horizontal layers of services, network and access. Delphi Study Lauri Frank The nearby future of the OSS/BSS industry was studied utilizing a Delphi method. The Delphi method is commonly used for future studies, and it utilizes experts, who are asked to evaluate different statements or hypotheses about the future. In this section these hypotheses about the future are referred to as miniscenarios (MS). By combining several related miniscenarios, scenarios about the OSS/BSS market evolution for the next 5 years (2009-2013) can be created. In this study, the Delphi method was employed using the following steps: 1. A set of 28 future statements to be evaluated were first gene