BETHESDA, Md. -- Major global shifts in what previously was a relatively stable telephony back office environment are well under way, according to new research recently conducted by Dittberner Associates, an international management consultancy and premier market research firm. According to one of the company’s most recent studies, “Support Systems for Next Generation Networks”, surprising shifts in global and regional demand for telecom services are driving a substantial realignment of dominant vendors and a movement towards consolidation -- even while the industry grows in absolute terms. "The old guard is changing in back office billing, support and service provisioning” said Donald Dittberner, president of Dittberner Associates, Inc. “ No longer is North America the lead market, by any measure and dominant players are slipping in rank. The primary drivers of this are wireless growth in Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe, as well as new Internet service delivery over broadband worldwide. Finally, while this industry has experienced consolidation, successful small new firms are experiencing substantial growth.” The software vendor market is heavily fragmented, with the top 25 firms holding nearly three-fourths of the market share. Of those leaders, non-U.S. companies account for approximately 32%, and are continuing to grow. Israeli-based Amdocs, for example, is now number one in market share for pre-packaged software ahead of Telcordia. For those vendors offering hardware, integration services and software in the OSS/BSS space, the rankings are Ericsson, followed by NTT Comware, then Telcordia. Shift to Emerging Markets: Since North America, with its universal access and lifeline policies, has saturated wireline connectivity, OSS growth is slowing here and leadership will be displaced by other world regions. Today, North America, Europe and Asia Pacific are about at parity with $4.0 billion to $4.4 billion in annual overall OSS/BSS software spending. However, Asia-Pacific and Europe combined will exceed $24 billion in 2008 vs. modest growth in the U.S. to just $6.8 billion. In fact, the count of announced international carrier deals specifically for Next-Gen OSS/BSS solutions are in the UK, Germany, Canada, Brazil, France and Italy, by rank. Aside from US saturation in wireline, other key market deterrents are uncertain regulatory policies between the competitive carriers and the incumbent Bells, as well as the two year sustained drop in venture capital funding for startups. Product Suite Shifting: Historically, the lion’s share of OSS functionality has come from billing systems. Today Network Management/Operations and Service Management/Assurance at 15% and 17% are growing disproportionately faster. Service creation of incremental features and delivery of new information products is growing most rapidly in broadband, as opposed to wireline or wireless sectors. In this sector, top producing vendors include Ericsson, HP, NTT Comware, and Alcatel. Key drivers in service provisioning and creation are the reduction in OPEX by automating previously redundant or manual processes. The consensus view among tier one carriers is that they can capture between 125% and 175% of invested capital in “flow-through” or “zero-touch” systems for every dollar spent on OSS software. Dittberner Associates Inc.