Evolution of Telecom Operator Software Industry: Conclusions and Future

Abstract

Analysis of software industry is a challenging task due to the inherent characteristics of software industry. This is not simply due to the immaterial nature of software, or to zero marginal cost of replicating software, nor it is due to knowledge intensiveness of the industry. Most software is vertical software and is developed for the purposes of some vertical industry, such as finance or telecom, whose business the software will support. The major challenge for analysing a vertical software industry comes from understanding the interaction of software technology and the business requirements of the vertical industry.

If the vertical industry is mature and includes a relatively high number of enterprises with standard business processes then software can be seen as a commodity whose cost should be minimized. In this case the vertical software industry is also likely to have entered a mature stage in the industry evolution model. In line with this development, the vertical software industry has most likely reached a dominant design indicating the later phases in the vertical software market evolution model, where a few dominating companies are servicing the vertical industry with their product-based offerings. The other extreme can be found from emerging industries, which use in-house software development or IT consults to create software systems that provide competitive advantage for the enterprises creating a new industry. In both of these cases the model for industry evolution stages and the phases in the model for vertical software industry evolution go hand in hand.