Movement to Services a Threat to China's Telecom Equipment Makers?

A growing trend in telecommunications has been the outsourcing of network operations from the telecom service providers to the telecom equipment markets (see for example this Wall Street Journal article). While Huawei has been cognizant of this trend for several years and has even published reports about it, a real question remains as to whether or not Huawei and ZTE will be able to meet the challenge of the move to services-cum-equipment model that appears to be emerging.