IPTV is a perfectly awful, sophomoric joke inspiring moniker and it needs new name. If that wasn’t already clear from the fact that virtually no operator lets the acronym get within the last 100 meters of it marketing–heck you still can find VoIP as the awe inspiring label among some providers–the fact hit home during this week’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. Maybe it was the 16 inches or so of snow that was dumped on the area as the event was getting started, but a surprisingly large portion of this very traditional cable show was dedicated to figuring out how cable operators should migrate their video infrastructure to all-IP. This trend will be the focus of a future (shameless plug alert) Yankee Group report in part because it offers significant opportunity and potential for chaos among both operators and vendors.
But what to do about that name? Several vendors I spoke with at the show were hesitant to even verbalize what cable considers a four letter word. One VP of marketing even flat out said “everybody hates IPTV” while the acronym stood in two foot high letters as a prominent part of his booth. A handful of vendors have started pasting IPTV with somewhat chunkier sobriquets such as “broadband video” and “video over IP.”
A few suggested that the real issue is IPTV’s strong brand identified with telcos. Cable operators would prefer giving away free HBO for life to adopting something that came out of the “evil empire” as one operator called all telcos.
The reality however is that as unappetizing as it may be for vendors and operators alike, the name is likely to stick around for some time. Part of the reason is that there isn’t a significant difference between the gear that brings IPTV to cable and telcos. The path to an all-IP network it turns out leads to multiple networks that look eerily similar.

I spent the day at Juniper’s analyst and media event at the New York Stock Exchange. The event was filled with pomp and circumstance as Juniper launched its largest marketing campaign in recent history, and maybe the company’s history. Juniper updated the analyst and press community on its vision, announced some new products but left many questions unanswered some of which are new and some are holdovers from the “old” Juniper.

The first and most obvious change was the corporate logo change. Gone is juniper plant and dark blue font and enter a much simpler logo that highlights the “IP” in the logo.

Only time will tell whether the new logo has any impact on they way the company is perceived, but I do remember when Cisco changed its logo, Juniper issued a fake press release stating it saw no need to change its logo. In fact, I still have the t-shirt they sent along with it. So, what’s changed? What’s changed is the approach Juniper is taking to networking as the company is finally thinking along the lines of being a “platform” vendor. The concept of “network as a platform” is a vision that Yankee Group has been articulating for years so it’s nice to see one of the major networking vendors moving in this direction.

As for the actual announcements at the event themselves, here were the highlights:

• Re-articulation of the “single OS” message and push of “Junos” as the brand. This has been Juniper’s key marketing message for the past few years. I actually think it has some merit, and I think Juniper’s done a good job of quantifying the benefits, but it does have some holes. First, Juniper isn’t a single OS company. While it has Junos, ScreenOS (from Netscreen) lives on. In fact, the new high density top of rack switch is an OEM from Blade Network Technologies so Juniper has some way to go to get to a single OS. Also, I think most organizations do not really consider the OS as part of the network equipment purchase, so Juniper has a lot of work ahead to make the OS matter. I think it can matter, but it’s going to require a shift in thinking.

• Launch of the long awaited Trio chipset—formerly known as the code name “trinity” —and service provider routers MX 960 and MX 80. This was, by far, the beefiest part of the day. The Trio chipsets (for which there are 4—does anyone else find that confusing?) are a leap ahead in silicon technology. CTO Pradeep Sindhu went through all the technical aspects of the product – 65nm technology, 1.2 billion transistors, 604GB IO performance, etc, which most people won’t understand but he did give some stats that people could get, like being able to download the whole library of congress in 12 seconds. The performance specs of MX 960 and MX 80 are through the roof compared to competitive products. Service providers are the bread and butter for Juniper and these products will keep Juniper ahead of the curve.

• Launch of Junos Space and Junos Pulse. Space is an open platform for ISVs to develop network enhanced applications on. It includes an APIs, SDKs and applications that will act as a “platform” for application development. It follows a trend that Extreme started a number of years ago (although Extreme never managed to monetize it). More recently, Cisco launched its AXP developer program and announced a number of ISV partners with it. The concept of Space is fine but I would have liked to have seen some third party examples of Junos based applications. The three Juniper showed off were created by Juniper and, while this is interesting, it’s not fulfilling on the vision of a third party ISV program. It alluded to partnered applications but didn’t show any. Pulse is a unified end point application. The concept is that all clients that IT departments need to put on the various end points are collapsed into one client. Initial uses are for WAN acceleration, dynamic security and location aware services. Overall a good start but the proof will come in Junipers ability to attract third party ISV partners.

• David Yen went over the Juniper data center to cloud vision. I was highly disappointed here. The majority of David’s presentation was great but was a repeat of the vision that the company outlined when it launched Stratus, its joint project with IBM. There was a “3 steps to cloud” network roadmap given that was “simplify, secure and shared” which isn’t really anything new. What was missing was much of the detail on what exactly Stratus is. This includes how Juniper plans to address the storage connectivity challenges in a data center which is currently dominated by Cisco and Brocade, when a product will be available, etc. It’s great vision, but it’s still just a vision and needs more detail to be tangible.

However, despite all of the fanfare, the conference did leave many open questions regarding its long term strategy including:

• How it leverages the opportunity in mobile environments. As we said after the acquisition of Starent by Cisco, the single largest opportunity for layer 2/3 equipment is in the mobile markets. In fact, Juniper had a rolling counter that showed the number of clients attached to a network—a visual just to show you how massive this opportunity is going to be. However, the majority of vendors in this space go to market with a single, mobile and fixed solutions approach. When Juniper’s partner-to-be, Starent, was snatched up by Cisco, Juniper was left wanting. However, Juniper did outline a project “Falcon” that appears to be a reference architecture to deliver on the core transport part of the mobile environment, but it’s not clear who the partners might be.

• What its wireless LAN strategy is. There’s no doubt that 802.11n is going to have a significant impact on the way companies design the corporate networks. Juniper, who has a great desire to be an end to end vendor, has a huge hole in its product line by not having a WLAN solution. Industry rumor is that Juniper is building its own but that’s likely to not be ready until next year and limited to just branch environments meaning Juniper might miss the initial wave of 11n deployments.

• How it will address future product innovation. Juniper had been a company that hadn’t been shy to acquire. Some were successful (Unisphere, Netscreen) and some not so much (Peribit, Redline) but it did use acquisition for innovation. Today it seems the single OS vision is driving Juniper to build more than buy and this could slow down their innovation. For example, it could have acquired any number of Ethernet switch vendors (Force10, Foundry, Extreme) instead of building its own. Sure it wouldn’t have been Junos based, but they would have a larger share of the pie by now.

Overall my biggest question for Juniper is how a mid sized company like Juniper competes long term in this ever evolving industry. The majority of Juniper’s competitive environment is huge multifaceted companies like Alcatel Lucent, Cisco, Huawei and others. These companies go to market with a unified wired, wireless and services solution and Juniper, at its size, can’t compete along those lines. The enterprise space has Cisco and HP as well as smaller organizations that are very deep in a certain area (like Brocade in the data center). Juniper again, falls somewhere in the middle. Juniper is too small and doesn’t have the right mindset to grow significantly through acquisition but it’s too big to be an acquisition candidate for all but a few companies, most of which have too much competitive overlap. So for now, the vision of what Juniper announced is fine, but all of us Juniper watchers will be looking to see how quickly they can get there.

CFO Tim Morse just finished up his presentation here at the Yahoo Analyst Conference, and of course, he presented some details of the timeline of the Yahoo-Microsoft Bing deal. Bottom line: the clock hasn’t even started yet, and it’s going to take years before the benefits of this deal actually come to pass. It’s a long-term strategy, not a short-term play.

And right after that presentation, Carol Bartz dropped a bit of a bomb. The Yahoo-Microsoft deal  was supposed to close last night at midnight. It didn’t. Instead, the two companies filed a form 8K with the SEC about 10 minutes ago to extend the deadline.

This isn’t a big deal and shouldn’t affect the regulatory approval timeline (although it can’t help), but it does show how hard it is to get a big complex deal like this done.

Today, I’m out at the Yahoo Analyst Conference in San Jose, California. This morning, we’re mixed in with the financial analysts, and the day kicked off with CEO Carol Bartz introducing the day. I thought her tone was refreshingly honest, and worth passing on, especially given Yahoo’s presence (and subsequent challenges) in the Anywhere Economy. Here are some highlights of the things she said.

“Yahoo was the big shining star in the 1990s and mid-2000s. But then we become not so shiny. We have kind of lost your respect over the years, whether it’s our 6% operating margin (which is pathetic) or something else.

“Here we are, a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring. But we’re the largest communications engine in the whole world. When we can serve up impressions of 9 billion ads a day through our networks, that’s innovation, and that’s scale. You don’t just start up an Internet company and do that. We know how to do these things.”

“Our advertisers are looking for a safe neighborhood. When you have 78% of the U.S. population coming to your site, the business is not about growing to 79%. Our job is to deliver insights and audience to those advertisers.”

“Who’s my competition? It’s ESPN in Sports. In finance, it’s WSJ and Bloomberg. For home pages, it’s AOL and MSN. Those are all our competitors, and we wake up every morning with passion to beat every one of them.”

“”We’re not a search company; we’re not a display company. We’re a broad-based Internet company that serves up content to millions of people. We’re not here to wow you today; we’re here to intrigue you and impress you.”

My take: no matter what you think of Yahoo today, it remains one of the foremost Internet engines that powers the Anywhere Economy. No one should be writing them off, especially with Carol running the show.

With a rallying cry—”The Anywhere Enterprise^® is coming!”—the virtual desktop revolution is upon us, threatening to redefine the client computing experience for enterprise employees and challenge the status quo of existing corporate network, security and management infrastructures.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) represents the future of enterprise desktop computing and brings with it the detachment of OSs and applications from physical endpoints—a compelling trend that promises greater flexibility, scalability, cost savings and security benefits. The movement also represents radical, and possibly painful, changes in market dynamics for providers of endpoint hardware, software and services.

Ealier today, Zeus Kerravala and I hosted a webinar where we discussed the future of VDI and what the technology has to offer enterprises today.

The webinar runs about an hour: audio (mp3) and slides (pdf).

Earlier today, Juniper and Dell announced an OEM agreement where Dell would private label and distribute Juniper’s MX service routers, EX Ethernet switches and SRX secure gateways.  This announcement is strategic in nature as virtualization is driving networking and computing together requiring vendors to align their product portfolios along this trend.  This partnership follows many other announcements made over the past two years including the following major industry events:

• Storage networking leader Brocade acquires best of breed IP networking vendor, Foundry Networks
• HP moves former ugly stepchild, Procurve to favored child status by bringing into the Technology Solutions Group (TSG) that includes other data center technologies such as storage and servers
• Cisco launches Unified Computing System (UCS) and declares war on server vendors
• Big Blue counters Cisco’s move and jumps back into networking and agrees to OEM Brocade IP networking equipment
• Juniper and IBM outline Stratus “vision” for cloud and the role of the network.  IBM also agrees to OEM Juniper Ethernet switches
• Dell expands networking product portfolio and agrees to OEM Brocade IP networking products
• Dell further expands portfolio agreement with today’s announcement with Juniper.

This move has only upside for both Juniper and Dell.  Juniper has strong enterprise network products but lacks a significant channel to move its products.  The Dell and IBM partnerships could become a significant channel for Juniper and Brocade.  Currently, OEM distribution makes up almost all of the market for storage networking but not for data networking.  As the compute and network industries are brought together, OEM will need to be more involved in network decisions.  Even if it’s only 10% of the overall market, that’s still $1.8 billion in revenue that will flow through this channel which is larger than the combined IP networking revenues for both Juniper and Brocade.  There’s product overlap with both Brocade and Juniper so neither will get all of the business from IBM and Dell but there’s enough business that both will be significant beneficiaries.

This trend of having compute and networking brought together is a bad one for the rest of the industry.  Historically, the enterprise networking industry was known as Cisco and the seven dwarves which pitted the 800 pound gorilla, Cisco, up against a number of companies with small share including Extreme, Enterasys, 3Com, Nortel, Avaya, Alcatel and Foundry.

Some of the dwarves are already gone through acquisition (Nortel, Foundry), and others, such as Extreme and Enterasys, are on their deathbeds.  In fact, the only one of the original dwarves that could pose a threat to Cisco in the future is 3Com.  3Com’s China out strategy creates a unique positioning in the market where they have a growing customer base in China and low cost R&D group to keep products current and near the front of the pack as far as technology goes.  Cisco’s current dominant share is reflective of that fact that executed well but also these smaller companies continued to mismanage their own business giving Cisco a bit of a free ride.  Cisco’s incredible run deserves a tip of the hat, but it could not have been accomplished without the competition making many mistakes.

What Cisco will find moving forward is a much more difficult competitive environment.  Instead of competing with tiny companies that couldn’t sell cheese to a mouse, they’ll be competing with the likes of HP, Dell and IBM.  Even the “pure plays” of Brocade and Juniper are much larger than the pure plays of years past bringing Cisco’s “free ride” to an end.  Additionally, Cisco won’t be able to use many of the strong arm tactics it has with partners and channel any longer as the competitive options are as big, or bigger, than Cisco.

Overall, I see the OEM and compute vendor influence being a significant factor in the growth of networking and will help shape the new vendor landscape.  While the death of the seven dwarves could be viewed as a negative for the industry, I’m excited about the new life that’s been brought into a once stagnant industry.

The eBook business is hot. Barnes and Noble just announced its $259 Kindle-killer, the GSM-connected Nook with a color touchscreen complimenting its eInk bland and whie display, Amazon started shipping the international edition of Kindle, and Sony has promised its Reader Daily Edition eBook reader for December. Analysts everywhere (Yankee Group included) are sharpening their pencils and cuing up forecasts of hundreds of thousands of eBook reader sales for this holiday season. And why not; eBook readers take books and make them easy to buy and consume in today’s Anywhere Economy.

At the same time this eBook reader war has been capturing media attention,  a price war has been brewing over paper books. Walmart has cut best-selling hardcover prices to $10 from their normal $24 price tags. Amazon (the same place that sells $9.99 eBooks and the $259 Kindle) has matched Walmart’s prices. Target, not to be outdone, has started pitching selected $9 hardcovers. Add to this the fact that most consumers cherish the flexibility of paper books—the ability to write in them, paste sticky notes in them, lend them to friends, and resell them when they are done with them—and the traditional book market is looking like it could make a comeback with consumers as well.

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When you’ve been a technology analyst for as long as I have, you either use or see all the hackneyed phrases that language has to offer.  My personal bugaboo, inherited from a mentor years ago, is the use of the word era to describe a period of just a few years. As in, “the smartphone era.” Dictionaries typically first define era as a geologic term characterizing a massive passing of time – e.g., the Mesozoic Era. I’m sure Apple hopes the iPhone and its offspring will be around for a long time – but it might be stretching things to suggest that long time might span 180 million years.

Mesozoic gastropods outlasted smartphones

Another overused tech industry term is “the Year of X”, where X is any technology that the analyst fervently believes will finally move from proof of concept and early adoption to mass deployment. I personally wrote a report in 1996 talking about the Year of Cable Modems. Which, if I’m being honest, was probably at least a year too soon.

Yet as the saying goes, “I may be paranoid — but someone could still be out to get me.”

Recent data from Yankee Group’s massive monthly surveys of U.S. enterprises — in which we hear from thousands of IT and line-of-business people about their companies’ connectivity activities and intentions — suggest that enterprise IT investment in the coming few years will be characterized by a heavy focus on mobile technologies.

Gee, that’s just not as fun as predicting “the age of enterprise mobility”, is it?

Anyway. Two recent Yankee Group reports, one looking at large enterprises and the second at the small-to-medium-business (SMB) arena, reach similar conclusions. Sheryl Kingstone highlights large enterprise intentions to go mobile in 2010; Steve Hilton shows that SMBs see it the same way. Combining reported priorities for mobile-enabled applications and smartphone deployments, 46% of large enterprises and 50% of SMBs put these at the tops of their investment lists over the next two years.

That’s good news for the enterprises themselves — which stand to reap measurable productivity gains by bringing company data and apps to their workers anywhere they are — and for the associated technology vendors.

(And it might not stop with the mobile devices and systems themselves. In a recent chat with Enterprise Mobile CEO Mort Rosenthal, he suggested that the iPhone may be Apple’s enterprise “starter drug”, causing businesses to progress from accepting Apple’s smartphone to having a more generous attitude about the company’s laptop and desktop computing platforms as well.)

Let’s hope that the caution that has accompanied all tech spending during the downturn follows re-expanding IT budgets in 2010, so that businesses don’t squander the mobile opportunity. The potential pitfalls that lie ahead include carrying existing application silos to the mobile device (versus integrating the experience to deliver the information the worker needs regardless of whatever apps use it on tethered platforms), trying to shoehorn too much functionality into a smaller screen (versus building from use cases that suggest what the worker really needs), and over-constraining the variety of mobile platforms (so that workers can’t use their own mobile devices).

But it can be done. Let the Enterprise Mobility Era begin! Oops — sorry.

A secondary exchange for Anywhere devices

Yankee Group colleague Andy Castonguay recently published a killer report predicting the near-inevitable death of mobile phone subsidies (actual title: The Golden Subsidy Egg’s Goose is Cooked). One of the points he makes is that carrier subsidies mask the actual cost of the Anywhere devices that consumers are buying. To pay back those subsidies, carriers lock consumers into long-term contracts they may not actually want. I recently saw a store sign that nicely illustrated some of the real prices of mobile devices.

Every day I walk over the top of Boston’s Beacon Hill on my way from the train to Yankee Group’s office at One Liberty Square in the Financial District. Last week, I chose a path that took me down toward Downtown Crossing, and I ran across the white board shown at the right in the window of one of the shops along the way. I was so struck by the image that I grabbed a picture of it with my mobile.

So what should consumers take away from this primitive secondary market for mobile devices? I came away with three immediate observations:

1. Unsubsidized mobile phones vary significantly in price. If you walk in and pay cash, you can walk out with a 16 GByte iPhone 3GS for about $700. On the other hand, an HTC Touch Pro 2 is only $525 and a Blackberry Tour is $450. Those are big differences among phones that claim to provide roughly similar experiences.
2. Carrier subsidies mask phone cost differences quite effectively. Buying those same phones—the iPhone 3GS 16 GByte, the HTC Touch Pro 2, and the BlackBerry Tour—with line activation and subsidy would cost you $199, $349, and $149 respectively. Suddenly, that expensive Apple hardware looks pretty cheap, while the HTC phone looks premium-priced. Yes, the differences in hardware prices will all be addressed by your monthly payments over two years, but almost no one does that calculation, nor are operators advertising that you eventually pay those phone subsidies, one way or another.
3. Someone has figured out how to get out of AT&T iPhone contracts. Given that US iPhones are only sold with 2-year AT&T commitments, the interesting question is how this store managed to get a supply of iPhone 3GSs to sell. Yes, selling your phone for nearly $500 will help you with your payments for a few months, but at the end of the day, someone is still committed to paying the roughly $1,700 in service commitments necessary to fulfill a 24-month contract at $70 a month. I can only conclude that someone has figured out how to break the AT&T contract and yet keep their phone. Alternatively, perhaps the store is capitalizing on consumers who trade down from an iPhone to a different phone on the AT&T network, but who still is willing to pay the monthly fees. Or, maybe the store is just tapping into the international gray iPhone market.

In some ways, this store is distilling down mobile phone contracts the same way Wall Street takes apart financial obligations: they’ve created a secondary market for the phones separate from the bundled hardware/service contract. As Andy points out in his report, both consumers and mobile operators would be better off if mobile phone contracts didn’t use subsidies that created such complicated contracts, simply because the costs and profits would become obvious to everyone involved. But until then, secondary markets such as the one noted above help us understand the real prices of mobile phones.

The wireless market is littered with companies failing to extend their strong brand into the potentially lucrative US smartphone market. Compaq, HP, Motorola and Nokia, to name a few, all tried and failed to become a meaningful player in the US smartphone space. There is recent news about the introduction of a smartphone from Dell’s consumer business unit. Dell introduced a proof of concept device in Beijing back in August, but that for was for its Chinese partner, China Mobile. Questions remained about plans to launch in the US. Last night in Silicon Valley Micheal Dell put all speculation to rest. Dell is launching a smartphone in the US in early 2010.

The looming question is whether Dell can avoid the fate of those who failed before them. One of the keys to success in the smartphone market is a sleek, sexy and contemporary design. Dell is not familiar with those adjectives. Apple vaulted to the top of the market based on those virtues. However, while design is important there are other attributes that contribute to the success of smartphones. RIM, the leader in the US smartphone market, continues to hold its own against the sexier iPhone.

Attributes of smartphone success:

So what attributes are key to smartphone success, besides a cool design? There are 3 other attributes that will position a smartphone for success: street cred with enterprises, integration with other services and a user friendly operating system. The Dell device will likely have all three of these things in spades. It’s these attributes, in conjunction with the design that will result in a resounding success for Dell.

1. Design

Let’s address design first. The fact that the device is emanating from Dell’s consumer business unit demonstrates recognition that all mobile devices must be consumer devices first. Nokia’s n900 and e62 were examples of devices that had enterprise chops but missed the mark on design. They were the smartphone equivalent of orthopedic shoes – functional but not fun. I expect the Dell device to be similar to Blackberry devices in that it will be just cool enough for consumers to adopt. Like Blackberry it will be a well crafted compromise of design and usability.

2. Enterprise credibility

This is not a requirement for smartphones but it’s critical for companies as many don’t aim to please the enterprise at all. However, appealing to the enterprise is one way to gain a foothold in one segment of the market. This was the approach taken by RIM. Dell certainly has an abundance of street cred with enterprises. While they won’t necessarily be selling directly to enterprises it will give comfort to operator sales representatives who, despite having a wide array of devices available, make their own assessment of what will resonate with enterprise buyers. Dell’s enterprise brand is unparalleled and is not a risky alternative for enterprise buyers. This market can be a stronghold for Dell as it musters momentum among consumers.

3. Integration with services

Dell has its own enterprise services with which the device can interoperate. While the remote back-up and recovery services might be interesting to enterprises it’s a snooze-fest for consumers. However, the not so well kept secret is that Dell selected the Android operating system for its device. In doing so it wisely hitched its wagon to a rapidly growing developer community focused on consumer friendly applications. Again, Dell and Android will be a perfect marriage of fun and function.

4. User friendly operating system

The last category that’s critical to mass market success for smartphones is a user friendly operating system. The Motorola Q had a sleek design and an operating system that the average consumer found cumbersome. This explains Motorola’s recent commitment to a bevy of Android devices. Nokia’s recent announcement that its devices will run operating systems other than Symbian is a nod to the fact that the OS matters. Android, the OS of choice for Dell, has momentum and mass market appeal.

Many are quick to dismiss the viability of a Dell smartphone given its reputation for uninspired design, but function matters. Dell brings a dose of pragmatism and Android a dash of fun. Together I expect them to cook something special.