ket. These motivations are associated with the latter two phases presented above, i.e., horizon- tal cross-selling, market share and new growth opportunities respectively. From the assumptions we derived a classification according to which the M&A transactions can be categorized: (1) In case a vendor acquires or merges with another gaining revenue from the same segment, the transaction is labelled as strengthening M&A. (2) In case a vendor acquires or merges with another gaining revenue from different segment(s), the transaction is labelled as expansion M&A (these two cases postulate that the acquiring vendor specializes in the particular vertical software market, that is, receives over 50% of its revenue from the vertical software market). (3) In case a vendor acquires or merges with another and the acquiring company receives less Analyzing the Current Phase of the OSS/BSS Software Market than 50% of its revenue from the vertical software market, the transaction labelled as horizontal entry M&A. For the analysis a set of commercial data from Dittberner Associates Inc. was employed, consisting of a list of transactions with the vendor names of the acquirer and acquiree, combined with the total and OSS segment specific revenues of the vendors. The data set covered the years 2001-2007 for the telecom software (OSS) market, a total of 56 transactions and 236 companies. Classification of the transac- tions into the above presented categories was carried out by first examining the telecom software market specificity of the acquirer, to find the horizontal entry M&A transactions. Then, the transactions with telecom specific acquirer were further classified as belonging either to the category of strengthening or to the category of expansion, by comparing the revenues of the acquirer and acquiree from segments of the market. The number of cases for each year was added together to examine the trend in transactions. The results of the analysis are shown in Fig. 6. The information of the M&A classification analysis leads us