The whole area of professional services for enterprises is the biggest area of growth in enterprise IT and communications right now. HP paid $13 billion - a 30% premium - on buying IT services firm EDS last month. Between them those companies have just 5.3% of the market, behind leader IBM with 7%.
For telcos, the big opening is that the ground is coming out from under the feet of traditional IT firms. IT is becoming a utility, delivered to corporates from the cloud.
As we have seen, businesses are keen to unload the task of running IT and comms themselves, and are looking for firms that can deliver software, storage, security and managed IP over a pipe.
Structurally separated or not, telcos should be following their business customers into the cloud.