are industry was therefore vertically integrated and relatively consolidated as an industry. Analyzing the Current Phase of the OSS/BSS Software Market B. Growth of the industry. After the initial stage, new vendors providing more specialized software solutions emerged. These vendors disintegrated the telecom- munications software market vertically and fragmented the market structure. As a result of the increase in the number of vendors, the OSS software industry became more vertically disintegrated and competitive. From the demand side, the outsour- cing of non-core business operations also seems to have driven the vertical disinte- gration. These developments are also in line with the above mentioned industry studies with regards to a growing number of vendors and a less consolidated market structure. The key reason for this vertical disintegration seems to be the desire to gain efficiency, innovativeness and flexibility in software manufacturing as mentioned above by Macher and Mowery (2004). C. Industry matures. Later on, most of the CSPs' operations have been unified on a conceptual level, with telecommunications operators having modularized their operations in the form of agreeing with the Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (Sanz et al. 2006). Thus, software manufacturing can be considered as been vertically disintegrated from the operator's other functions. Some of the services provided by a CSP have been integrated and some telecommunications operators have specialized as service or network providers. In the near future, operations are likely to be further integrated over the supported technologies, and the number of technologies is likely to decrease partly because of, for example, the disappearance of the PSTN network. Also, it seems that network access and operations could largely be acquired as managed services, leaving the connection to the customer as the only area of activity for the CSP. In the latest stage, the OSS software industry shows indications of reconsolida- tion and also of vertical reinteg