 be evaluated in terms of cost, return on investment, time, risks, and SO on. Then, the most appropriate technology or handful of technological options that can enable the company to achieve its corporate objectives need to be selected. The vendor community will go through an R&D phase for the technology or the technologies that are either getting standardized or on the roadmap of operators. For example, in the late mid 2000s the industry was looking to evolve EV-DO to UMB and HSPA to LTE. Then, WiMAX started to appear and ended up by eliminating UMB (evolution of EV-DO) from the race. Thus, vendors and operators development teams have to align their future expectations according to their corporate strategies. 12.2.1.4 Stage 4 - Development and Evaluation After passing gate 3 and short listing the technical options the vendor community need to develop products and solutions. One of the most important decisions is whether to produce the core technology in-house or acquire it from an external source. Further elements that need to be assessed at this stage are: level of in- vestment for R&D, type of innovation, intellectual property, and SO on. Infrastructure vendors have to col- laborate with third party and test equipment manufactures in order to deliver an end-to-end solution. The infrastructure vendors are those that provide equipment like base stations, MSCs, SGSNs, GGSNs, etc. The product and solution providers will also have to be involved in creating awareness in both technical (non R&D) and business teams of the operators. Formal training needs must also be fulfilled during this stage. The vast majority of operators are not product manufacturers, but they do conduct assessment of technologies, products, and solutions. The evaluation involves active participation in SDOs, research, testing in vendor labs and in-house (labs and field) testing. For example, we are seeing a close cooperation between operators and vendors in the development and future commercialization of EPS. A vast majority of the industry has