This is a weekly newsletter describing what happened in my work during the past week and how I see that affecting Ericsson (as interpreted my me in my role working for LME/DMA in San Francisco as a business developer with a focus on Internet applications and enablers). The report will be published every Monday (except holidays).

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Last week’s input is derived from my attending the Sun Americas Executive Alliance Summit. Moreover, I had a number of one-on-one meetings with Internet startups: Eba Systems, GWCom and a project with a codename “Concierge”. I also attended the business breakfast of Garage.com with some 100 people. The schmooze of the week was Drinkexchange.com with some 1,000 webheads exchanging business cards.

Sun has excellence in managing a distribution channel

Channels play a big role in Sun’s strategy (60 % of products sold through the channel), squeezing maximal results out of them is a strong focus. With customers having increasingly the product relationship directly with Sun (extranets), the channel is enticed to take on services and systems integration (current penetration low, under 30 %). They have better sustainability and better margins. It was interesting to hear that Sun is far from being a web company internally (”we looked into it and we had 300 internal proprietary applications”) and in their relations towards customers.

Sun is claiming a category leadership in “Internet network infrastructure”, fueled with the increasing maturity of Java and the network computing vision as well as the new opportunities emerging from Jini. Two years ago it was trying to carve out a gorilla position but the bananas were raw… is the situation different today?

The market message of Sun has been built around “we are the dot in .com” and “what can we dot-com for you today?”. Mass-customization of enterprise computing solutions is the buzzword of this spring and it is expressed in one word you probably have heard already: portals. Sun is branding concepts webtop.com and datacenter.com, among others, to materialise their vision on a network-centric “application dialtone”.

The newly-formed Sun-Netscape Alliance is a “virtual company” with 2,200 employees and the vision to become the e-commerce powerhouse on earth. The effort relies on the relationship with AOL, a formidable testbed. Netcenter will focus on private label portal opportunities as a new area. The alliance is looking for a large community of integrators, one of the reasons for the early appearance in front of the reseller community. The alliance expressed a strong focus on “post-PC” solutions, highlighting wireless Internet and embedded communications. Who will be their partner to create the wireless Internet solutions? Ericsson? Or Lucent, the leading e-commerce partner of Netscape?

Scott McNealy, the CEO, focussed on the core strategic issues. His conclusion was that Sun is a product company and wants to stay as such, in order not to lose focus. He argued that the ambiguity between product, service and broker roles was the fundamental cause for the strategic weakness of Compaq and SGI. Interesting. And how about this: “Compare the market cap of AOL, Yahoo, Ebay and E*Trade with the combined market cap of 100 largest systems integrators in the US and you understand that Wall Street believes in the network-centric business model winning in the new economy.”

The startups of the week

Concierge Inc. is the brainchild of a very smart individual whom I met and whose identity I will keep secret for the moment (but I can talk offline with interested parties, I have this up as an active investigation). The company plans to offer personalized content and digital coupons for mobile users. The Concierge wireless portal service provides accurate, concise, timely and targeted information services that are tailored for hand-held form factors. Concierge’s goal is to map content to context in order to enable transactions.

Eba Systems (http://www.ebasystems.com) is one of those spinoffs of Oracle that start to populate the wireless Internet space offering solution for the “wireless ERP-tone”. I had dinner with the founder, have to find home at Ericsson for this one soon.

Selected quotes (stop and think about each of them for a second…)

“I would like to say to Microsoft that mail is not an industry but a feature of a webtone switch. Likewise, storage is not an industry but a feature of the server. Size matters. Software goes away. Applications go away. Resellers’ core business goes away. The future opportunities form around enterprise portals and ERP-tone.” - Scott McNealy

“The next economy is all about creating portals.” - Barry Ariko, EVP, Sun-Netscape Alliance

Some useful contacts

To be completed later in the week.

END NOTES - InterVU stock price went up, why? - http://www.networklive.com - http://www.mypersonal.com - http://www.virtualis.com - http://www.requisite.com/ -