e decreasing although the vertical software market has not matured yet. As a general implication, the industry evolution life cycle and the vertical software market evolution seem to be only loosely coupled and the lack of software market growth causes market consolidation even in the middle of the vertical software market evolution. This would imply that the vertical software market evolution has stopped to the second Evolution of Telecom Operator Software Industry: Conclusions and Future phase from the network technology viewpoint. However, the number of software vendors focusing on the customer interface layer is more difficult to predict as the border line between CSP software providers and the vast number of internet service software providers becomes more blurred due to the market convergence. 3 Future Work on Vertical Software Industry Analysis This analysis of telecom operator software industry was based on the previous research of vertical software markets in Finland (Tyrväinen et al. 2004) and on an analysis of six vertical software industries: construction, energy, finance, forest, machine construction, and retail (Tyrväinen et al. 2005). Focusing on one industry enabled gaining deep insights of the vertical software industry dynamics. The future work will continue along multiple tracks. Within the OSS/BSS industry there are multiple targets for further analysis based on the changing business environment and the rapid technology development in the domain. These include topics related to the technology layer starting from analyzing the impacts of new network technology to the software vendors, adoption of all-IP technology through dominating LTE or WIMAX technologies as well as analyzing approaches where network management and even the whole network layer is increasingly acquired as managed services. In the service layer, potential research targets include analysis of adoption of service development platforms which can potentially form a dominant design for the industry. Most interestingly, the new busi