Last week, Sprint announced a landmark outsourcing deal for mobile carriers, turning over its network operations to Ericsson. The headline number is $5 billion value to the deal and 6,000 Sprint employees wlll become Ericsson employees. Clearly this is a major win for Sprint, which can now focus its resources on customer acquisition, service enhancements, and growing the network, while allowing Ericsson to do what they do best –  maintaining the network infrastructure. It’s an ideal example of shifting the commodity segments of a business to an outside vendor to improve efficiency and profitability, and in doing so, shifting the primary focus to growth of the organization, in this case, Sprint. Essentially, the network operations segments of the wireless business, like those in media are duplicative across providers, even with CDMA/TDMA technology differentials. In media, each major  company – Disney, Fox Interactive, Viacom, NBC Universal, has built largely duplicative network operations facilities. Even in a tight margin business like digital music, Napster, Pandora, Rhapsody and iTunes have their own data centers and ingest, encode and host their own content. As the business of digital media matures, and CEOs and CFOs look for ways to improve the bottom line, I anticipate more deals like the Sprint/Ericsson arrangement. It’s easy to see envision a ubiquitous backend service for rich media.  It’s called Akamai. But a ubiquitous service bureau for licensing, hosting and reporting makes even more sense, between content owners and end distributors. It allows the content owners to focus on creating new content, reduces business development and business affairs cycles, and in turn allows distributors recognize similar efficiencies, and  focus on their primary business – growing their customer base to maximize revenue, product enhancements and creative packaging.