They got their business in order and made some good bets in technologies.

As observers, it would be foolish not to see challenges.

The commercial success of the next generation of media rich services hinges on the operators' ability to deploy best in class service building blocks. This partnership between BEA and IP Unity is designed to offer operators a proven set of pre- integrated building blocks to deliver blended multimedia services across any type of network environment.

They have to change or die. If that means getting rid of significant numbers of employees and reshaping (their) business to fit the new environment, that is what (they) have to do.

A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results

The first order of business,