On Monday afternoon at the Taqua Users Group conference in Richardson, Texas, Ed Cox, VP of marketing and carrier sales at Varaha Systems, got up and told the roomful of service provider executives, “Today’s a good day, because none of us were the guy carrying a clipboard and figuring out miles-per-gallon yesterday.”

He was referring to the NASCAR Dickies 500 race at the Texas Motor Speedway, which we (the assembled service providers, Taqua officials, and one lone journalist, i.e., me) had attended on Sunday. The race had ended in dramatic fashion when Kyle Busch, after leading most of the race’s 334 laps, ran out of gas with two-and-a-half laps to go, clearing the way for his brother, Kurt, to power on to victory in the No. 2 car. Less than an hour before, Kurt Busch had taken a long pit stop to ready his car for the final laps, losing three or four places in the standings in the process. Now, that looked like a shrewd maneuver.

NASCAR races, of which this was the first one I’ve attended, often turn on the slimmest of margins: Can I make it to the end on the fuel I’ve got left? Should I replace my tires now, or wait another few laps? How hard can I run this engine before it blows? And so on. Fortune favors the bold, except when it doesn’t.

To stretch a metaphor, I thought of the race today when I sat down with Taqua CEO Eric Pratt and asked him how he views the prospects in 2010 for his users at the meeting: largely rural, Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators who’ve been battered by the recession, landline losses, and the encroachment of big telcos and cablecos onto their turf. It seemed to me, I told Pratt, that there was a fair amount of FUD (“fear, uncertainty, and doubt”) in the room.

He answered by quoting Rick Overman, executive vice president at CHR Solutions, who appeared on a panel with Pratt at SUPERCOMM recently. “If you can take advantage of what is now affordable technology,” including IMS, integrated wireless and wireline capability, and all-IP networks, “and keep doing the things that made you successful originally – like focusing on your customers and your region and specializing your offerings for them, then you’re going to be successful. If you continue to operate like you have for 10 or 15 years, you won’t be around.”

So, operating a Tier 2 or Tier 3 service provider is a bit like racing NASCAR. You have to adapt to new developments and new technology faster than your competition. You have to make judgments based on the slimmest of margins. You have to have faith in what brought you this far. And fortune favors the bold – except when it doesn’t.