The two biggest parts of the telecom supply chain are under duress - and it's changing the relationship between them.
Vendors have long been pushing to sell more than just solutions. Thanks to the recession and the continued fall in their core businesses, operators are taking them up on it. They are now expecting more from their suppliers for less and at a lower risk.
Broadly, this means comms vendors are tracking in the path first beat by IT suppliers in 1990s, moving away from hardware and software to services. IBM expects to make more than 40% of its profit - $8 billion - from services this year.
A quick look at the numbers suggests this is underway slowly but surely. For all major vendors who post figures, services continues to grow in absolute terms and as a proportion of vendor revenue.
Of Alcatel-Lucent's three main divisions, for example, services is the only one that isn't operating at a loss this year. Services accounted for just nearly a fifth of its revenue in Q2. Ericsson's services group last year attracted just under a quarter of all sales. In the latest quarter sales rose 28%.
The biggest attraction for operators is cost savings. Managed services contract can take upfront capex out of the budget as well as cut opex costs.
Here the recession has certainly been a factor, though not a huge one, analysts and executives told Telecom Asia.
Adrian Ho, a program manager for IDC Asia-Pacific, said a managed services deal could "slice off 15%-20% of the cost" of running a carrier network or network subset.