Market scope of vendors in the OSS software market

This paper studies the market scope of vendors that produce software for telecommunications operators, i.e. the Operations Support Systems (OSS) market. The aim is to find out the strategies used by vendors in the OSS market. The market scope is studied on two dimensions: 1) the breadth of the scope in the OSS market; and 2) focus on the telecommunications industry. The breadth of market scope is divided into four categories: niche, vertical, layer and broad scope. We examine empirical vendor data from the years 2002 and 2005. Results show that all hypothesized strategies are present in the market. Most of the firms have either a niche, a vertical or a broad market scope, and they are specialized in telecommunications. The situation has not changed much from 2002 to 2005, but the number of vendors has decreased.