A new study by Forrester Research claims that so-called “programmatic” buying or “real time bidding” will account for nearly 25 percent of online video ad purchases by next year. This mirrors what is going on in the world of display advertising where more big advertisers are using ad tech tools to serve ads to diverse audiences in real time.

The report, which was commissioned by SpotXchange (an online video exchange that has skin in the ad game), also says that premium publishers have been slower to adopt programmatic bidding, in part because they fear it will undercut the value of their inventory. The report predicts, however, that many of these hold-out publishers will change their position as brands get accustomed to programmatic buying and begin to demand it.

The impact of programmatic on video ad prices is debatable. People in the ad tech industry point out that automated ad buying is simply a tool — not a reflection of ad quality. By this reasoning, publishers can hold their pricing line if they wish while also ensuring that their space is available in real time when there is a surge in demand. Conversely, as the report points out, publishers remain wary that brands will use the tools (as they did for display advertising) to drive down prices.

Overall, the future of video prices in the short term may be determined less by ad tech tools than by more basic principles of supply and demand. On this front, the good news for publishers can be seen in this chart which shows online ad spending rising quickly:

Another recent report is even more optimistic — pegging the 2013 number at $4.1 billion.

The bad news, though, is that the word is out about video’s promise and more and more people are showing up to grab a slice of the pie. Ad industry sources told the Wall Street Journal last month that there is ”not enough to feed everybody.” The Journal reported that, despite brands beginning to reallocate their TV budgets, prices are already under pressure; $15 to $20 per thousand views (CPM’s) last year versus a CPM of $17 to $25 in 2011.

The Forrester report also predicts that video ad inventory will be become increasingly divided between private and public exchanges.

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News of an updated version of Trusted Advisor — complete with new features and its free trial (for the month of March) — was unveiled on the AWS blog early Monday morning. Before now, Trusted Advisor was available to customers who signed up for enterprise or business class AWS support.

According to the blog, Trusted Advisor looks over a customer’s AWS environment and makes suggestions on how to save money, boost performance and shutter security gaps:

“Because the AWS Trusted Advisor draws upon the aggregated operational history of hundreds of thousands of AWS customers, you can be confident that the recommendations that it makes can help you to save money, bolster your security profile, improve the fault tolerance of your application, and increase overall performance. This is a unique and powerful benefit that is only possible with cloud-based, API-enabled infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, companies like Newvem, Cloudyn, Cloud Vertical and Cloudability have to be more than a little worried about this new tool, although they’d be the first to tell you that their own respective offerings watch and measure AWS better than Amazon itself does.

A Newvem spokesman characterized the freebie as big news for AWS users and “a great value as a broken-to-fix support play as in something is wrong with my security, I’ll use Trusted Advisor to fix it.” But, he added, Newvem provides more insights on how to improve a user’s AWS resource usage and to evaluate costs, risks and assets. Newvem started charging for its service late last year.

Amazon’s news is a no-brainer for a company that knows it needs to provide more enterprise-class support and monitoring options to placate enterprises used to having such tools, as GigaOM reported last summer. But it also illustrates the issue that, to grow, Amazon is encroaching more and more on spaces pioneered by small members of its ecosystem. Being an AWS technology partner is a risky proposition that is not for the faint-of-heart or the slow-of-foot.

What about the little guys?

Usually, when small companies characterize a huge company’s incursion into their territory as a validation of their strategy, it’s time to pat them on the head and offer condolences. In this case, however, there is some truth that a smaller, more nimble third party (aka Newvem, Cloudyn, et al) can offer more value.

As Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti told me last month with regard to some Cloudyn news:

“Amazon’s tools will get better and better but Amazon has no desire to get you to use less of its services. It’s like in storage — You’d think EMC would be the best vendor of storage management but historically they haven’t been.”

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IT pros besieged by demands to support all manner of once-unsanctioned tablets and smartphones in the office really want users to know why they hesitate to do so.

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend puts IT departments in a bind. Employees — often led by C-level execs — want to use their iPads, iPhones and other devices for work. But while those devices are easy to use, they’re not so easily integrated into corporate IT, especially in an age where IT staffs have been cut while their workloads have not.

My story last week on this issue — based on new Forrester research — struck a chord with IT pros. They didn’t disagree with the idea that if IT “locks down” personal devices — stripping iPhones of Siri as IBM is doing for example — employees will just use the devices anyway, but without IT awareness or sanction. Their beef is more around the reason IT isn’t necessarily rushing to embrace BYOD.

From their posted comments it was clear that IT pros don’t fear and loathe BYOD but that their departments are understaffed and overwhelmed.

Here’s a sampling of the commentary:

Todd Baker wrote that the underlying issue is that IT is not getting the resources it needs to support these devices:

Blame the executives who refuse to fund what IT does, continuously cut back and outsource the departments and still demand the same performance and productivity. … if you want a solid IT department you have to pay for it.

Commenter Tony agreed:

I’m not saying [BYOD] wouldn’t be great – I’m just saying, this costs money, that the corp execs just don’t want to spend, and I’m damn sure not gonna waste my time doing it (researching your tool-needs), when I’m already juggling the workload of 3, due to cutbacks.

Another post, signed by Projectzme, said one suggested solution — desktop virtualization — is too pricey to be realistic for many companies:

Forrester also suggests virtual technologies to provide a good solid Windows environment … [but] the world is in a recession and while the IBM’s of the world can afford to … get a VMware or Citrix infrastructure in place is expensive. Sure this could be done off site in the “cloud” but again, security is not in your control. For many companies just staying afloat is a problem enough.

Given the passionate arguments, don’t look for this BYOD debate to wind down any time soon.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock photographer Ostill

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Jim Bankoff, Chairman and CEO, Vox Media

Data helps destroy containers, and that’s a good thing. Data creates new content and information experiences and helps bring an end to the notion of content silos, Betaworks’ John Borthwick said: “The moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users.” Forrester’s James McQuivey pointed out that it’s not just a “tablet or iPad world,” but an “everything world” — and millions of people are consuming content not on iPads or e-readers but on gaming systems like the Xbox 360.

Digital storytelling is a native art. Stories on the Internet are not a new form of magazine or newspaper stories, but a medium in their own right — just like radio or TV. Publishers should develop their platforms accordingly rather than just repurposing other print vehicles. When Wenner Media released Us Weekly on iPad for the first time, it figured out a way to enable the “passalong” that’s so popular with the magazine’s print edition. As Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told us, George Lucas had to build a new story-telling platform called Lucasfilm so that he could tell the story of “Star Wars.” And don’t say blogging is dead: “That’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expression is dead,” said WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Not all “media” are created equal. Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Betaworks’ John Borthwick gave a rude awakening to Big Media executives, urging them to give up control of their content — and even to stop calling it “content.” But declaring new digital networks victors over somewhat different traditional print and broadcast operators after simply labelling each “media” can sometimes seem counterproductive and insufficient: What’s being created now are entirely new kinds of information vehicles. The industry is truly “at the crossroads” suggested by the paidContent 2012 conference’s subtitle– but technologists and information producers may now be heading in different directions, as well as speaking different languages.

Publishers have to sell their brands directly to consumers. “Publishing companies need to understand that the thing [companies] like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers really respect is a brand,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in an explanation of why those companies agreed to send customers directly to the Pottermore site to buy e-books. “If we’ve demonstrated anything, it’s the power of a brand,” he said, noting that over half of Pottermore’s e-book sales result from readers coming directly to the site instead of being referred there by the retailers. Not every brand is Harry Potter — but “need to understand that their role in the future is creating these brands,” Redmayne said.

It’s time to toss CPM as a yardstick for online advertising success. How can Facebook be so inept at advertising? Because it’s handing advertisers a sledgehammer not a scalpel. Betaworks’ Borthwick and GigaOM’s Om Malik say it’s time to discard old-fashioned display ads as the basic unit of online ad success. Instead, it’s time for advertisers to adapt their ads to the evolving nature of the internet itself. That means forgetting about CPMs and focusing on data and social dynamics. On a broader level, it means re-imagining basic precepts of advertising and product discovery in a world where Web pages are being eclipsed by new types of online discovery and interaction.

If you didn’t make it to the TimesCenter yesterday, you’ll find video of all yesterday’s panels here (registration required). And let us know your takeaways from the day in the comments.

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The survey was conducted among book publishing executives at publishers across the U.S. that represent 74 percent of U.S. publishing revenues. Forrester will present the full results of the study at Digital Book World in NYC on January 24, but the initial findings are as follows:

– 82 percent of respondents are optimistic about the digital transition, down from 89 percent a year ago.

– 61 percent of respondents believe readers will be better off as a result of the digital transition, down from 74 percent in 2010.

– 60 percent of respondents believe more people will read than before, down from 66 percent in 2010.

– 47 percent of respondents believe people will read a greater number of books than before, down from 66 percent in 2010 — a 19 percent decrease.

“People are generally optimistic still, but that optimism is waning,” said Forrester’s James McQuivey. “Publishers have started to do the hard work of making the digital transition and they’re finding that it is, indeed, hard work.”

These initial findings don’t speculate on the reasons why publishers are increasingly bummed out, but a few thoughts: 2011 was a tough year, marked by the death of Borders; Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) also expanded hard into publishing. And as the digital transition continues, we’re seeing some statistics that suggest increasing digital sales are compensating for the decline in print sales–but other stats suggesting they aren’t. Combined, those factors–plus McQuivey’s point that the digital transition is hard work–may be weighing on respondents’ minds. An 82-percent “general” optimism rate is still pretty good, but it’s surprising to see how pessimistic publishers are about the companies where they actually work, and how much more pessimistic they are than they were last year.

I can’t think of an obvious reason why respondents are less likely to believe that people will read more books as a result of the digital transition and look forward to getting some more info on that point. Update: Digital Book World covers a few reasons here.

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In putting together the Global Tech Market Outlook for 2012 and 2013, Forrester talked to 46 major IT vendors as well as agencies like the IMF, U.S. Commerce Department and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and now estimates over the course of 2012, Apple will sell $9 billion worth of Macs and $10 billion worth of iPads to enterprise companies worldwide. That’s up from the estimated $6 billion spent on Macs and $6 billion on iPads in 2011. Forrester calls its corporate growth “the big surprise of 2011,” especially because Apple has never actively or directly targeted business users. The report notes:

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George Colony, the chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, re-ignited a minor firestorm recently, with a presentation at the LeWeb conference in which he argued that the web is dead, and being replaced by the app economy — with mobile and smartphone apps that leverage the cloud or other services rather than the open web. That sparked some strong responses from longtime open-web advocates such as RSS pioneer Dave Winer, who argued that apps are not the future, and others who compared them to the “interactive” CD-ROMS of the 1990s. Do apps necessarily mean the death of the web, and if so doesn’t that mean we are losing something important?

Colony (whose presentation is here and slides are here) argued that the “app Internet” is the future in part because of the continuing increase in computing power — both in the cloud, where giant server farms store and process our data, and in the devices we hold in our hands (in the 1990s, according to Forrester, the iPad2 would have been one of the most powerful computers in the world). But bandwidth hasn’t kept up with these changes, said Colony, and therefore the web as we know it has to give way to a world of apps that process and display the data coming from services in the cloud.

Closed systems are great if you own the platform

This may sound like a great world if you are an app developer — or if you are a key part of the app economy the way that Apple and other platform providers such as Facebook and Google are. Apps are useful because they allow you to control the experience your users have down to the tiniest detail, and also because they give you a channel with which to offer them things they might pay for, whether that’s the app itself or the content or service you get through it (games, reviews, newspaper content, etc.). If you are Facebook, you get a direct channel to the players of those Zynga games or the social-reading apps that media companies have launched.

But not everyone thinks this is a great world to live in: Winer, for example, says this app ecosystem is like a series of disconnected silos of information — silos that work only with a specific service or platform, and that in many cases can’t even link to other apps or to content outside their own silo. As Winer put it:

[I]f I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it.

Web veteran John Battelle of Federated Media made a similar argument in his response to Colony, saying the app ecosystem has benefits, but that it still doesn’t offer most of the things that he associates with the open web — and if the “app Internet” replaces the web but doesn’t develop those features, then as far as he is concerned the web might as well be dead. Like Winer, the Federated Media founder said that the most important of those features is the fact that the web is based on open standards, so websites can easily interoperate and exchange data. Apps, by contrast, are walled gardens that can only talk to each other if the platform owner allows it.

Is the web dead, or is it just evolving?

As Winer noted in his post, this theme has come up before — and will likely come up again. The last time it reared its head was last year, when Wired magazine ran a cover story arguing that the “web is dead” and the app economy is taking over (although it used a somewhat misleading graph of web traffic to make this argument). Among the responses to the issues raised in the story was one from the web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who argued that this trend was something fundamentally negative, since it gave platform companies like Apple and Google control over their walled gardens in a way that was bad for the internet as a whole and likely for society as well.

As some have pointed out, to a certain extent the debate over the web vs. the app ecosystem is a debate over terminology. After all, many apps are simply dedicated web browsers that use web-based standards and technologies to display and manage data — and there’s no question that some apps do this in a way that adds a lot of value for users. Games, for example, can do much more within a native app than they could with HTML5, and so can apps that use a device’s camera or other built-in features — such as Path, which is one of the most beautifully designed apps I’ve ever used.

Some, including startup advisor and investor Dave McClure of 500Startups, say there doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between apps and the web, and that apps which can link and exchange information across different services or devices are possible — even if there aren’t many of them right now. Apps don’t have to be walled garden-style silos like the CD-ROMs of the late 1990s, as Scott Hanselman referred to them in a post responding to Colony’s presentation. Social-web consultant Stowe Boyd argues that we need a different paradigm that goes beyond either the browser-based web or the simple nature of apps, and that the app ecosystem we have now is (or should be) just a transition phase.

Ideally, we will wind up with a world that combines the best of apps and the best features of the web — the openness, the lack of proprietary standards and gatekeeper-style platform owners. Perhaps somewhere out there, startup founders and developers are working on just that kind of solution. Like Battelle and Winer, I hope we can get there.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jason L. Parks and Fabio Venni

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Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would launch its tablet-friendly version of Windows, Windows 8, sometime in 2012. Device makers who are reportedly signed on to make Windows 8 tablets include Dell as well as Nokia (NYSE: NOK) (itself pinning its OS strategy heavily on Microsoft’s star).

But 2012 may be too late: according to Forrester’s analysts, consumers who were once looking forward to the launch of a Windows tablet are losing interest. In Q1, 46 percent of consumers said they would most of all prefer Microsoft’s OS on a tablet; today, that number has come down to 25 percent. Apple, meanwhile, appears to have gained some more fanboys, increasing to 28 percent from 16 percent in the most-preferred platform standings.

The prominence of Apple is even more stark when you consider preferences based on actual devices, where the iPad zoomed ahead of the competition at 61 percent:

Bu the decline in consumer interest is not the only problem, says Forrester, which provides a laundry list of challenges that Microsoft faces in tablet game:

– It calls Microsoft a “fifth mover” in the tablet market, coming well after every other big player (and then some if you count Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and its route to “forking” Android) has had a crack. Those who are still standing like Apple, Samsung and possibly even RIM will have launched their second or third-generation products by the time Microsoft finally sees its first tablets come out.

– Forrester notes also that the iPad and Apple have moved in on application development, and even enterprise use, areas where Microsoft with its cadre of developers should have been reigning supreme.

– The analysts also believe that Windows Phone 7, which currently languishes with seven percent market share in smartphones, will not be a boost, either: Microsoft will not be able to benefit from the stickiness of one in attracting people to the other, as Apple has done with its iPad. (The analysts do, however, point out that Nokia’s use of the platform could serve to boost that standing.)

Taking a litte step back here, it may be worth playing devil’s advocate for a moment.

Earlier this year, Nielsen noted that tablet penetration in the U.S. was at less than five percent. While that has probably moved on since May, considering that the U.S. is one of the biggest markets today for advanced mobile devices, it is probably safe to say that similar penetration, if not less, holds in other markets.

If you are of the opinion that tablets are a mainstream and not niche product longer term, this implies that there is still a very big market to play for, not just for Microsoft but for the many others making tablets already.

Although Forrester does rightfully point out that so far Apple has captured developers’ attention in terms of content development, that has not held back the launch of some recent tablets with innovative content plays of their own — namely the Kindle Fire from Amazon, which not only offers a lot of apps, media and other content to users, but has advanced the notion of how to offer these in a unified cloud-based service. And for a very low price, to boot.

If anything, what these factors seem to imply is that Microsoft still has an opportunity, but the gauntlet is now down for whether they and their device partners will be able to deliver on innovative, price-sensitive products to meet it.

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At this point, Forrester’s research suggests that Microsoft has fallen behind others, and not just Apple when it comes to tablet demand. In a blog post, Forrester’s JP Gownder paints a bleak picture:

For tablets, though, Windows really isn’t a fast follower. Rather it’s (at best) a fifth-mover after iPad, Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, HP’s now-defunct webOS tablet, and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. While Windows’ product strategists can learn from these products, other players have come a long way in executing and refining their products — Apple, Samsung, and others have already launched second-generation products and will likely be into their third generation by the time Windows 8 launches.

Similar to its onetime leadership in the smartphone market — Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform was popular prior to the iPhone age — Microsoft is now behind on another technology it pushed early. The first Windows PC tablets debuted a decade ago, but outside vertical markets and tablet enthusiast circles, they never really took off. The main issue? Tablets were seen as extensions of the desktop instead of stand-alone mobile devices. Between poor battery life and user interfaces that weren’t optimized for touch, it was generally a recipe for failure.

There is hope yet, however. Again, one has to look at the smartphone market to see it. Although it was slow to react to both Apple iOS and Google Android, Microsoft’s new Windows Phone handset platform is fresh and fun to use. I find the “metro” user interface to be intuitive and finger-friendly, which is good, because Microsoft plans to leverage it for Windows 8 tablets.

Software is only one part of Microsoft’s tablet issue. What about the hardware? Here too, Microsoft is finally looking beyond traditional desktop and notebook processors, which use more power than ARM-based chips that run today’s smartphones and tablets. Windows 8 will support these processors, allowing for devices to run all day on a charge or be in standby mode for a few days.

These two factors by no means guarantee that Microsoft can gain a foothold in the tablet market, and the company will have to work with hardware partners to get the message out: Windows 8 isn’t your father’s desktop operating system. If Microsoft can also work with developers to make the vast array of Windows software more touch-friendly, it could change consumer perception and make a Windows tablet desirable again.

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Employees are not only asking IT departments for Macs at work, they’re bringing their own into the office. The Forrester report finds that 22 percent of enterprise businesses foresee the use of Macs owned by employees “increasing significantly.” But at the same time 41 percent of those same companies don’t allow those employees to access e-mail or the company network on those machines, either at the office or from home. As analyst David Johnson writes, that just encourages people to spend their own time figuring out how to bypass these rules:

That leaves a lot of employees to find their own ways to get around corporate prohibition. Companies Forrester spoke with for this document described a gray market emerging internally, where employees share tips and strategies to use their Macs at work and bypass corporate roadblocks.

Forrester says you may as well let Mac users have them out in the open and accessible to the network at work since their study shows that people who want to work on MacBooks, for instance, classify as a “power notebook user.” To them that means those employees are the ones that work longer and are more productive. Another reason for the change of heart: Forrester says Macs “have developed a reputation for reliability and low maintenance.” What IT person in charge of the budget doesn’t want to hear that?

But while the guys managing desktop and laptop deployment may still need to get with the program, the teams managing mobile IT have already seen the light on letting employees have input on their devices. Since the arrival of the iPhone and Android smartphones, this same phenomenon has been taking place. A group of mobile IT specialists talked about it at GigaOM Mobilize in San Francisco last month.

Julie Palen, SVP of Tangoe, says that a great percentage of employees are not asking their employers for a corporate phone. They don’t mind paying for a device or the plan as long as they can use a device of their choice and access the company network, she said.

“It’s irrelevant who owns the device or who pays for the plan,” said Palen. “It’s all about the device, as long as the data is secure and controlled … then that’s the big change and the answer becomes yes.”

Because the tools are there to secure those networks, companies are basically silly not to let tech-savvy employees use their own devices. And mobile IT guys finally figured it out this year, the Mobilize panel agreed:

“2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of effect Forrester’s exhortation has over the next year or so. Will IT managers take it to heart, or just continue business as usual? We can guess which option employees would want.

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