I’m doing the reporting right now for a February cover story on the state of industry “transformation” projects, and like everywhere else, the shape of the economy keeps creeping up as an issue. The same undercurrent was there at the TM Forum show in Orlando last month.

There’s absolutely no doubt that service providers will be watching capex spending closely and will be looking for ways to reduce opex spending in every way possible. That will affect service provider plans, vendor sales, and on and on.

But there’s been an interesting side story worth noting that I’ve run into several times, particularly when looking at how providers are progressing in transforming their networks, their IT systems and their business models: If service providers can hold their own during the downturn — and though landline is shrinking, mobile and video look to be on the surge, even with the slowdown — they may be well-positioned when we come out of this thing.

In particular, the competition — including venture capital–funded Web companies and highly leveraged cablecos — are likely to have an even tougher time of it. All of these challengers have spent the past few years seemingly steamrolling the incumbent telecom carriers, but now that the economy has made it “put up or shut up time,” they aren’t feeling quite so cocky or confident.

So just as the incumbent telecom industry came out of the last bubble having outlasted CLEC, alternative ISP and dotcom 1.0 rivals, the same may happen in this downturn.

Because whatever you say about incumbent service providers, they have real customers and a real business model charging for real services.

Already, Web 2.0 companies and over-the-top content and application providers are struggling to find revenues — mainly because in many cases they’ve never had to before. Consider micro-messaging service Twitter, which today hired its first(!) “product manager” to help turn its surging service into a moneymaker. Compare that with the short message system and mobile messaging market — dominated by service providers — which in 2008 generated $130 billion in revenue, according to Portio Research.