That’s what Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff told employees in a companywide email following a complaint from Goldman Sachs that accused Bloomberg News journalists of using private subscriber information pulled from company data terminals to break news.

According to reports, Bloomberg journalists routinely gathered information from the company’s financial data terminals, which are widely used on Wall Street. While reporters weren’t able to see market-sensitive details like securities-level or trading data, they were able to see customer contact, login and usage data, and chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives.

Far from hard-core “big data,” but easily enough to gather insight into a trader’s interests and thinking. Indeed, sources at J. P. Morgan tell the Financial Times that the firm believes that Bloomberg reporters used login information to determine whether Bruno Iksil, the so-called “London Whale,” had left the bank. Other sources tell CNBC that a former Bloomberg employee used the company’s data terminals to view usage information on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Sources say that a preliminary investigation into the incident by Bloomberg found that hundreds of reporters had misused the company’s terminals by trolling for scoops.

Just ask yourself this: How much would a hedge fund pay for the information Bloomberg journalists had?

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) May 11, 2013

Bloomberg has since restricted its newsroom staff’s access to customer data, following the complaint from Goldman. It has also created a new client-data compliance officer to oversee customer data-security issues. Meanwhile, both the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department are said to be scrutinizing the incidents.

Dow Jones & Co., publisher of AllThingsD and The Wall Street Journal, competes with Bloomberg in financial news and information.

Doctoroff’s note in full, below:

Since our founding more than 30 years ago, the proper safeguarding of customer data has been a central tenet of Bloomberg’s culture.

A Bloomberg client recently raised a concern that Bloomberg News reporters had access to limited customer relationship management data through their use of the Bloomberg terminal. Although we have long made limited customer relationship data available to our journalists, we realize this was a mistake.

Having recognized this mistake, we took immediate action. Last month we changed our policy so that all reporters only have access to the same customer relationship data available to our clients. Additionally, we decided to further centralize our data security efforts by appointing Steve Ross, one of our most senior executives, to the new position of Client Data Compliance Officer. Steve is responsible for reviewing and, if necessary, enhancing protocols which among other things will continue to ensure that our news operations never have access to confidential customer data.

To be clear, the limited customer relationship data previously available to our reporters never included access to our trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems or our clients’ messages. Moreover, reporters could not see news stories that clients read, or the securities they viewed. Bloomberg has very strict data security policies in place, in addition to significant and rigorous training, processes and protocols. Upon hiring, all Bloomberg employees enter into confidentiality provisions, including Bloomberg News.

Client trust is our highest priority and the cornerstone of our business, and we are deeply committed to ensuring the complete integrity and confidentiality of our clients’ data in all situations and at all times.

Dan

Martin Hajek

What if Apple’s long-rumored low-end iPhone isn’t targeted at the smartphone market’s lower reaches? What if it’s targeted at the middle?

What if it isn’t low-end at all, but simply mainstream? Not a $150 phone or even a $200 one, but a $350 one? A “mid-end” iPhone?

That’s the theory put forth by Gokul Hariharan and Mark Moskowitz over at J.P. Morgan, and it’s a pretty compelling one, with strong historical precedents.

With a starting price tag of $329, Apple’s iPad mini was initially dismissed as too pricey to attract budget-conscious consumers drawn to Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which, at $249 and $199, respectively, were significantly cheaper. But the device proved wildly popular, and has since established a new mainstream price band between the tablet market’s high end ($499 and up) and its low end ($249 and down). And it unquestionably expanded Apple’s tablet market share.

Apple did pretty much the same thing with the iPod nano. At launch, it priced that device at $199, which was less than the $299 the marquee iPod commanded, but significantly more than the low-end MP3 players of the time. And that, too, proved a winning strategy. The nano solidified Apple’s dominance of the MP3-player market, becoming so popular that it accounted for about half of all iPod shipments in the first few years after its launch in 2005, according to J.P. Morgan.

In each case, Apple sacrificed a portion of its typically high margins to field a high-end product with enough mainstream aspirational appeal to expand its market share. And that has become the company’s M.O. — CFO Peter Oppenheimer said as much during Apple’s last earnings call:

“We are managing the business for the long term and are willing to trade off short-term profits where we see long-term potential. The iPod is a great example of this. When we launched it in 2001, its margins were significantly below the margins of Apple at that time. Four years later, the iPod and the iTunes music store comprised half of Apple’s revenues and inspired us to build the iPhone.”

Now the iPad mini is another great example. We have priced it aggressively and its margins are significantly below the corporate average. However, we believe deeply in the long-term potential of the tablet market and think that we’ve made a great strategic decision.”

Presumably, Apple feels much the same way about the smartphone market. Will it follow a similar path to tap into its long-term potential? Seems likely. And, as you can see from the J.P. Morgan chart below, it could have a lot to gain by doing so. All it needs is a new iPhone priced low enough to draw budget-conscious consumers and first-time smartphone buyers into a higher price range.

Here’s Hariharan and Moskowitz on the implications: “Currently Samsung dominates this segment ($200-500 price range) with 35+ percent market share. … We believe Apple could take 20-25 percent of this market in the next 12 months (from almost no market share currently), if it prices a lower-priced product at $350-400 levels.”

J.P. Morgan now owns 2.6 million shares, or less than half of a percent of the social games company. Based on today’s stock price of $2.59 a share, the shares are worth only $7 million.

A big reduction by an institutional investor, like J.P. Morgan, implies that it doesn’t have a lot of confidence that the company can turn things around in the coming months.

The last time J.P. Morgan updated its stake was a year ago. In January 2012, J.P. Morgan said it owned 6.7 million shares, which equated to a 6.7 percent stake. Back then, shares were trading at $9.12, so the stake was worth a whole lot more, roughly $61 million.

It’s not clear exactly when J.P. Morgan sold its share or at what price. Typically, institutions update their records when their holdings drop below 5 percent.

J.P. Morgan’s relationship with Zynga began during its public offering, with the bank serving as an underwriter. As part of the deal, the bank agreed to buy an undisclosed number of shares associated with the IPO.

Since then, the bank’s research department has flip-flopped about the company’s prospects.

In March, three months after the IPO, J.P. Morgan’s analyst downgraded Zynga to “neutral” from “overweight,” which sent shares sliding by 6 percent. A month later, J.P. Morgan reversed its upgrade and returned the stock’s rating to “overweight.”

It was optimistic about the company’s acquisition of Draw Something and Zynga’s management team’s decision to raise full-year guidance based on the performance of the acquired mobile game.

Of course, Zynga’s troubles started shortly after, with the company having to revise its guidance downward more than once. Not only did its Draw Something game fail to meet management’s expectations, but its revenue on Facebook also dropped.

Zynga’s stock jumped 4.4 percent today to $2.59 a share. The 11 cent spike was tied to the news that Zynga’s patent portfolio has increased as it begins investing more heavily in online gambling.

Greycroft Partners has closed a $175 million fund, its third since it began investing in consumer Internet and media companies in mid-2000.

In a press release, the New York- and Los Angeles-based venture firm said the fund was oversubscribed. But general partner Alan Patricof noted that Greycroft capped the amount and kept it small compared to other VCs, in order to maintain its focus on investing in early-stage capital-efficient start-ups.

“It’s always been our philosophy not to overfund the companies we invest in,” Patricof said in an interview. “It’s sometimes been hard in an environment where there is a lot of money available to entrepreneurs, but we are looking for start-ups that understand that it’s important to maintain the right balance of funding.”

The concept of a small fund is important to Greycroft, which has only three general partners and three venture partners, said general partner Dana Settle. The firm typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million, with more of a focus on online media, mobile and video, and also has a small seed fund.

“I think we are very hands-on helping our companies, but you don’t have to always do that in the traditional way most VCs do,” Settle said. “We want to maintain focus on giving our companies the right kind of advice, and let the entrepreneur take the lead.”

In fact, Patricof and Settle stressed, Greycroft does not often take board seats on the start-ups it invests in, and typically invests with other VCs in syndicates, which sometimes means the firm has less equity.

So far, Greycroft maintains that its system has worked. Its first fund of $75 million was raised in 2006 and has invested in 34 companies, with 11 sold and 130 percent of committed capital returned to partners; its second fund of $131 million, in 2010, put investments in 32 companies, several with valuations over $100 million.

Patricof noted that “the sale of our companies is usually our goal,” rather than an IPO event.

Exits include Vizu, acquired by Nielsen Holdings, Huffington Post (AOL), Babble (Walt Disney) and Buddy Media (Salesforce.com). More recent investments include Klout, Pulse and Maker Studios.

Most previous Greycroft investors have re-upped in the latest fund, the firm said, including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock Private Equity Partners, Fairview Capital and Invesco Private Capital. It also added new investors including Hall Capital, Hamilton Lane, Greenspring Associates and Cambridge Associates.

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo is among the companies taking a serious gander at TVGuide.com, the online entertainment listings, video and news site and mobile app.

Earlier today, Deadline Hollywood reported that its owner, Lionsgate, was in “advanced negotiations” to sell the site for about $20 million to one strategic bidder.

That’s the approximate price, my sources said too, who noted that Yahoo is only kicking the tires to determine if the site would add to its online media efforts and that such a deal is not in a final state.

But TVGuide.com is right in the wheelhouse of Yahoo’s acquisition efforts under CEO Marissa Mayer. She said the Silicon Valley Internet giant was looking at smaller purchases to round out its product line, especially in the mobile area.

Thus, its M&A point person, Jackie Reses, has been looking at “everything in the world,” according to numerous sources, across a large spectrum of arenas. TVGuide.com is in the media space, obviously — another she’s looked at is Los Angeles-based Maker Studios.

Hollywood studio Lionsgate last reported that TVGuide.com has upward of 24 million unique monthly visitors, and also has almost seven million mobile app users.

Lionsgate bought the site and television network in 2009, which also is owned in part by J.P. Morgan’s One Equity Partners.

Later today, new Yahoo CEO and latest savior Marissa Mayer is expected to debut in her first major turn as a public company CEO, as the company reports its third-quarter earnings.

Unfortunately, her initial script recounting the last three months is likely to be rather lackluster, with Wall Street anticipating yet another nothing-to-write-home-about financial performance from the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Investors are expecting $1.08 billion in revenue and 25 cents in net income per share in a report that is likely to show more of the same kind of weakness Yahoo has had for far too long. The main reasons this time: Worrisome growth in search and display advertising, especially compared to robust worldwide trends.

Such concerns have kept Yahoo’s stock pretty much flatlined at about $16 a share since she arrived in July.

And that is not likely to change until Wall Street hears more specifics about Mayer’s future plans. Yahoo has previously said she would outline more about her direction on the call with investors later today, after the financial results are released.

Thus, it’s basically a wait-and-see attitude, until Mayer does that, and perhaps until after there is some actual traction.

As noted by Cantor Fitzgerald’s Youssef Squali:

“1) We’ve seen this movie before (this new CEO is the fifth in as many years) and 2) it will take some time before any of the yet-to-be-announced changes yield any meaningful P&L results. Until then, we see Yahoo! shares remain cheap with limited downside, but no clear catalyst to drive them higher short/medium-term.”

Among the highlights that investors hope will be covered by Mayer and also by new CFO Ken Goldman:

A cogent strategy to turbocharge the business, which — as ATD has reported many times — will focus on tech and product solutions; what acquisition arenas are in the pipeline; plans for new talent recruitment and perhaps layoffs of less-than-stellar employees at the bottom 20 percent of Yahoo; the status of talks to sell off its stake in Yahoo Japan; and, perhaps most of all, what are the plans to return cash to shareholders from its recent sale of its partial stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

That might already be in the works via stock buybacks that Yahoo has been engaged in, but it will be interesting to see if Mayer will provide more specifics.

Investors will also look for some details around mobile growth, and perhaps an update of how Yahoo is fixing its search monetization problems with its partner, Microsoft.

One development that some expect is that Mayer will drop future expectations, in a classic take-out-the-trash move.

As J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth noted:

“Similar to what AOL CEO Tim Armstrong did when he stepped in a few years ago, we believe Mayer is likely to remove low quality ad units and over-monetization throughout the site. Despite the near-term monetization impact, we think this would be a good thing, as it would improve the user experience and de-clutter the site. Additionally, we think it’s likely new management would simply want to start off with a low bar.”

And, if she makes it low enough, anything Mayer will do going forward is likely to look pretty good.

Sales of the new iPhone could add between a quarter and half a percentage point to annualized economic growth in the fourth quarter, J.P. Morgan chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli estimates. That could help to cushion the U.S. economy from other risks in the final months of the year.

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Here’s all you need to know:

Facebook’s stock is now $17.73, down another 1.8 percent after hitting previously low lows on Friday. That’s off 53.3 percent from the IPO in May.

The cause? More negative press and a pair of price downgrades from two of the social networking site’s key Wall Street underwriters — from $45 to $30 from J.P. Morgan and from $38 to $32 from Morgan Stanley.

While no longer as bullish, those new price targets are still rather lofty, given today’s slide, 77 percent and 66 percent higher respectively.

This all comes after a spate of worries about mobile growth, payments growth, lockup shares for sale growth.

It’s essentially a growth of growth worries, in which the limbo pole keeps getting lower.

Current basement scenarios on the price are at $15 to $17 a share — right where the stock seems to be headed for what investors hope is a final soft landing.

As everyone with a pulse knows, Facebook shares took another dive Friday to reach the lowest level yet since its ignominious public offering in May.

Shares closed at $18.06, down 5.4 percent, which is half of its happier $38 IPO price. Actually, more than half, with a 52.3 percent decline overall since then.

Investors are not pleased. Facebook employees are not pleased. Even the New York Times Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin finally got unpleased, and unloaded on Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman (who has been under attack, by the way, for a while now).

“When Facebook’s I.P.O. first started to appear troubled back in May, I purposely avoided weighing in. Frankly, I thought it was too soon to judge,” wrote Sorkin. “But we have passed the pivotal three-month mark.”

Pivotal! Ruh-roh.

Actually, the Silicon Valley social networking giant will have to pivot for quite a while going forward, for a myriad of reasons.

Most of all, as John Paczkowski noted on Friday, and is also well known:

“The expiration of Facebook’s first lockup on 271 million shares earlier this month tanked the stock. And with four more yet to go, there is clearly further volatility ahead. On Oct. 15, 249 million shares will become eligible for sale. On Nov. 14, the lockup will expire on 1.32 billion shares. On Dec. 14, another 49 million shares. And on May 13, 2013, the final 47 million shares.”

In other words, that’s a lotta lockups to be unlocked.

And, as you can see from these two helpful lockup-expiration-focused charts for a range of other tech IPOs of late from SNL Kagan, that means a lot of downside for Facebook’s stock:

But, as I noted, this is already known by all, as Business Insider’s Henry Blodget — who has done some of the sharpest analysis on the troubled stock story at Facebook — correctly noted in a post titled, “It’s Becoming Clear That No One Actually Read Facebook’s IPO Prospectus Or Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter To Shareholders” on Friday.

“As Facebook’s stock continues to collapse, the volume of whining is increasing,” wrote Blodget. “As I listen to all this whining, I have a simple question: Didn’t anyone even read Facebook’s IPO prospectus? The answer, I can only assume, is ‘no.’”

No, they did not, or they might have read about everything from the company’s slowing growth rate to its mobile issues to, yes, all those billions of lockups to come.

Also, he noted, a bit of math would have yielded the high price-to-earnings ratio, which remains high at Facebook’s current low stock price, especially compared to Google and Apple.

That does not mean everyone is gnashing teeth. One of Facebook’s key Wall Street underwriters, J.P. Morgan, gave a stronger thumbs-up to the company in a note released yesterday for the future, even as it cut back on its target price by 33 percent.

The worst news: J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth gave Facebook shares a $30 target, which is still far below his $45 target in late June.

Still, he also struck a sunnier note, saying he expects advertising revenue at Facebook to rise in the next year, even as payments revenue and overall profitability will be less.

Anmuth also said he expects Facebook to repurchase some of its now-cheaper shares to settle its tax bill related to restricted stock units via the credit or cash, rather than stock sales.

“This would essentially amount to a buyback of ~120M shares totaling $2.2B at current prices, and it would reduce the outstanding share count,” he wrote.

That’s probably cold comfort to shareholders, especially given most Wall Street analysts have urged buying, even as the stock has dropped.

Then again, since it’s not yet clear where the bottom truly is for Facebook shares, it is at least one less thing to worry about.

iStockphoto

Cheer up, David Ebersman. Here’s someone in New York who likes you: J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth thinks Facebook will be worth $30 a share — about 66 percent more than the battered stock is trading at this morning.

Yes, that’s a steep haircut from the $45 target Anmuth has had on the stock since June 27, when he first recommended the stock.

But, in a report published this morning, the analyst is still bullish on the social network, with an “overweight” rating.

Part of that is because Anmuth is less freaked out by the coming flood of Facebook shares as shareholder lockup rules expire in the new few months. He thinks Ebersman will be making a $2.2 billion “de facto share repurchase,” which will take about 120 million shares off the market.

The more important part of Anmuth’s bull case is that he thinks Facebook’s ad strategy is working, and has lots of upside. He’s bumping his ad revenue estimates up, and thinks the mobile ads Mark Zuckerberg started selling this year will approach $1 billion by the end of 2013.

Here’s Anmuth’s’ projections for Facebook’s mobile ads and “sponsored stories” ads — the ones Facebook users see in their newsfeeds (click table to enlarge):

And here’s his take on Facebook’s “marketplace” ads — the ones you see on the right-hand side of your page, which will become less important to the company over time:

If all that pans out, Anmuth figures that Facebook will be generating EBITDA of $4.2 billion in 2014. And if the company gets back to $30 a share, that would mean Facebook would trade at the same 15x multiple investors assign to Amazon, he notes.

Anmuth isn’t the first person to make the hopeful “Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is Jeff Bezos with more hair” analogy. Trivia question: Who was Amazon’s original CFO?

In a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today, the company said that the bulk of the proceeds will go toward working capital and other general corporate purposes.

Underwriters include Morgan Stanley, Allen & Co., Cowen and Co., Pacific Crest Securities, Canaccord Genuity, Wells Fargo Securities, JMP Securities, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs & Co.

The seven-year-old company, which has 1,450 employees, says it has seen tremendous growth for its enterprise resource management software.

Over the past three years, the company’s revenue has skyrocketed, increasing 400 percent to $134.4 million. And in the first six months of 2012 it has already booked $119.5 million in revenues. However, the company has a history of losses. In the year ended Jan. 31, it lost $80 million. In the prior year (which is slightly different, because the company changed its fiscal calendar), Workday lost $56.2 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2010.

As of July 31, Workday had cash and cash equivalents of $122.7 million.

The IPO filing comes a little later than originally expected. My colleague Arik Hesseldahl reported previously that the company had been on track for a late-summer or early fall road show, so that shares could debut between October and December, depending on how favorable market conditions were. Those events may now be pushed out a little further.

The biggest shareholders are the company’s co-CEOs, Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, who own 19.3 percent and 53.4 percent of the company, respectively. Greylock Partners and New Enterprise Associates are the two largest VCs backing the company, owning 11 percent and 10 percent of shares, respectively.

Let’s begin by saying it is not new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s fault that the stock of the company has done a whole lot of nothing since the announcement of her appointment Monday.

After all, she just arrived.

But despite a lot of huzzahs from Wall Street over the solid choice of the high-profile former Google exec — which was being hailed by some as the answer to all of the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s woes — Yahoo shares still closed down yesterday slightly, and continued to fizz in after-hours trading.

Message from investors: Exciting choice, but you still need to prove that there is some light at the end of what has been a very, very long and pitch-dark tunnel for Yahoo.

It’s easy to see why, if you take a serious gander at the second-quarter results Yahoo released – in living color below — yesterday. They show a company that faces very serious and perhaps overwhelming problems that even a superhero CEO choice will find difficult to overcome.

Year-over-year growth of its global properties nearly flat, compared to an 13 to 15 percent rise a year ago; U.S. core search queries down 17 percent; minutes spent on its media properties down 10 percent; flat revenue touted as a good thing, since it was not down, at least.

Not down is the new up? In the land of Yahoo, it is indeed.

As Doug Anmuth of J.P. Morgan noted perfectly in a post-earnings note about the challenges the new CEO faces:

“This will be Marissa Mayer’s task going forward with her strong focus on product innovation and the user experience, but we continue to believe it will be difficult to turn Yahoo! around given mostly deteriorating engagement metrics, structural headwinds in the display space, shrinking search share, and limited mobile traction in the U.S.”

One bright spot is the $2.4 billion in cash that Yahoo has salted away, money that Mayer can presumably go hog wild with to bring in a spate of potentially invigorating start-ups and entrepreneurs, making Yahoo fast friends all over tech.

There is nothing like spreading around a lot of dough to make yourself popular again! And VCs become your BFFs!

That’ll come soon enough, but Mayer started just yesterday at Yahoo, and wisely bowed out of its analyst earnings call, with the company’s CFO Tim Morse noting that she needed to get up to speed on the state of the company before speaking out.

She needs to move fast, since sources said the signs for the third quarter are not promising, either, with Yahoo declining to provide guidance until Mayer can get a handle on the overall trends.

A handle that will take, it seems from the numbers below, a decidedly kung-fu grip:

YHOO_Q212EarningsPresentation

Code Advisors is getting a $25 million investment from financial services giant JPMorgan Chase for a minority stake in the Silicon Valley-based boutique investment bank and advisory firm.

The influx of cash will allow Code to grow quicker, said Quincy Smith, one of the firm’s founders, which also include Michael Marquez and Fred Davis.

The non-exclusive deal, the two firms said, is the natural extension of a longer-term relationship that has been developing for a while.

“To the extent that the money means we are getting even closer together, that’s great,” said Smith in an interview earlier today. “This solidifies a partnership that has existed for some time.”

Plus, it presumably also gives each what the other cannot offer clients. Usually a big bank might try to kill or buy a firm like Code, so this move is unique.

“We are growing our business and getting access to next-generation entrepreneurs that Code knows well,” added Kurt Simon, co-head of Technology, Media and Telecom Banking at J.P. Morgan. “And it’s a sign of continued investment in our important West Coast businesses.”

Indeed, J.P. Morgan has been competing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for a higher profile in Silicon Valley. It recently was selected with the pair as one of the lead bankers in the upcoming Facebook IPO. It has also worked recently with LinkedIn, Skype and Pandora.

Code has taken on smaller deals with a range of hot start-ups and entrepreneurs, which was one of the attractions for J.P. Morgan. That includes representing Spotify and LivingSocial, and making investments in Path and Flipboard.

“For J.P. Morgan, it’s like making an limited partner investment in another venture firm,” said Smith. “And for us, we can offer a lot more services to our clients as they grow.”

As part of the deal, Jes Staley, CEO of J.P. Morgan’s investment bank and a member of the firm’s operating committee, will become a non-voting observer on Code’s board.

Here’s the full press release on the deal:

CODE ADVISORS ANNOUNCES A $25 MILLION INVESTMENT FROM JPMORGAN CHASE

San Francisco May 3, 2012 — Code Advisors announced today that JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) has agreed to make a $25 million minority investment. Jes Staley, CEO of J.P. Morgan’s Investment Bank and a member of the firm’s Operating Committee, will also act as a non-voting observer at Code’s Advisory and Investor Board meetings.

“We are thrilled that JPMorgan Chase has decided to invest in Code Advisors,” said co-founder Quincy Smith. “This transaction demonstrates how together we might energetically adjust to serve the new needs of entrepreneurs and companies. The chance to work more closely with Jes and his team gives us awesome global and experienced perspective.”

J.P. Morgan’s investment and relationship will allow Code to accelerate its growth opportunities and allow each team to offer complementary services to their respective and shared clients.

“Identifying and supporting great ideas early in their development is particularly important in the technology space,” said Staley. “Code continues to uniquely identify next generation companies, and together we are excited to help those entrepreneurs grow and expand their businesses.”

Interestingly, RIM insiders continue to insist that the company needs outside counsel to help it ink the licensing deal it hopes will shore up its business. But that seems an unusual explanation. Typically, bankers are brought in to help negotiate large strategic investments. Or sales. That said, I’m told the company is not planning to put itself on the block anytime soon.

Well, today we heard from another bank, and its opinions about Intel’s Romley chip and what it means for data center spending couldn’t be more different. Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Market Research, published a note to clients today, arguing that Romley will indeed spur a new round of spending in corporate data centers, and that it will have an equally strong secondary effect on the fortunes of enterprise storage companies, specifically EMC and NetApp.

One of the things that Romley will encourage, Whitmore writes, is a growth in the density of virtual machines running in each server. (Remember that, more often than not, a physical server is virtualized or subdivided into many virtual servers, allowing each machine to act like several machines.) More virtual machines allows you to consolidate your physical machines and add more in the same footprint if you want, which in turn means more computing work getting done overall. Whitmore estimates that, in general, data centers will boost their workloads by 20 to 25 percent by the end of next year.

Roughly 26 percent of Romley chip purchases will be used in these virtualized environments, Whitmore estimates. And that tends to spur demand for storage to support the virtual machines. In fact, the growth of terabytes worth of storage products shipped mirrors closely the unit growth of servers. (See the graphic, below, which I screen-grabbed from the report; click to see it bigger.) In short, it’s good news for NetApp and EMC. Whitmore says both are taking share from other vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with sales growing at north of 20 percent a year — a growth rate that’s higher than that of the overall market, which grew 14 percent last year. He rates shares of both EMC and NetApp a “buy,” with price targets of $35 and $60, respectively.

Great news for EMC and NetApp, but what does it mean for Intel? Whitmore says to expect a mixed bag. Companies wanting to boost their use of virtual machines will be buyers. Companies that aren’t into virtualization so much, maybe not. “We believe our estimate of x86 servers shipped into virtual environments growing from 21 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2013 could prove conservative,” Whitmore writes. “As a result, although we expect Romley to have a relatively muted impact on overall server unit demand, we do expect it to drive another leg of virtual machine growth.”

She was in New York yesterday for a lunch with a few journalists, primarily to talk about Intel’s latest generation of Xeon processors for servers. Before they were officially released, these chips were known primarily by their code name, Romley, and often still are when analysts and others talk about them, because the code names are easier to remember than the product names, which, for the record in this case, is Xeon Processor E5-2600.

The Romley generation of chips builds on the foundation of Intel’s previous generation of server chips, known by its code name, Nehalem. The main benefit, which Bryant and other Intel execs and customers explain in lengthy detail in this video from the product’s launch in San Francisco three weeks ago, is that the chip is 80 percent faster at certain computing jobs, according to independent tests. At the same time, it is 50 percent more energy efficient.

Executives who operate data centers generally worry about two things: The raw number-crunching power they can squeeze out of the chips in their densely packed racks of servers, and the cost of the power required to keep them running and also keep them cool. So the introduction of a chip that can get more work done in a shorter amount of time while using half as much power is, at first glance, a pretty compelling moment to consider an upgrade.

And yet, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In a survey of 100 CIOs of large enterprises conducted by the investment bank J.P. Morgan, 91 said that they didn’t see Intel’s Romley chips as much of a catalyst for upgrades in their data center. Most seemed happy with the Nehalem-generation chips they had just purchased in servers during the past two to four years.

I was eager to share this result with Bryant to see what she said, and was too rude to wait until the salad course had arrived. For a moment, she was surprised — 91 percent is a pretty large percentage, after all. But the surprise didn’t last more than a few seconds.

Off the top of her head, Bryant rattled off the following, which I’m paraphrasing. On a recent visit with a customer who happens to be one of the 100 largest companies in the world — she wasn’t at liberty to identify it — Intel found an interesting result.

A check of the company’s data centers found that 36 percent — a little more than a third — of its servers were using chips that were more than four years old, meaning that they dated back to the dim mists of the days before Nehalem.

Those servers, it turned out, were responsible for consuming 65 percent — nearly two thirds — of its power supply. And how much computing muscle was the company getting for all this power? Precious little: The servers in question provided only 4 percent of the computing power of its infrastructure. To sum up: A third of the data center footprint was eating up two-thirds of the power budget, but providing less than one-twentieth of the overall computing capacity. Those older chips just aren’t pulling their weight.

“This is is extremely typical of what we’re seeing,” Bryant told me. Even so, she conceded that a customer running a larger percentage of more-recent chips — Nehalem and its newer variants — in its infrastructure might not see the sufficient bang for the buck of an upgrade that anyone running a lot of servers with older chips probably would.

I have to admit it was a pretty good answer.

It comes in the form of a survey of 100 CIOs by the investment bank J.P. Morgan. The firm finds that, on average, CIOs say they’re going to boost their IT spending by 2.7 percent this year, up from 2.4 percent in 2011. That may not seem like a big change, but here’s why its important: It’s the first time in a few years that the same survey has detected a directional change in sentiment. CIOs are at long last saying they intend to boost their spending on IT, rather than trimming it back and back and back as they have for the last several years. “In our prior CIO survey in September 2011, the directional movement indicated a reduction in planned spending growth, as at that time CIOs were starting to pare back on spending during more uncertain macroeconomic conditions,” the firm says in its report, which was shared exclusively with AllThingsD.

The optimism is a bit more pronounced when you see it expressed in the graphic below, which I grabbed from raw survey results. More than two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed said they planned to boost their overall IT spend this year, most of them by a modest 1-5 percent, but some by more than 10 percent. Last year, the figure was 58 percent, but it usually swings up by only 3 or 4 percentage points, analyst Mark Moskowitz told me.

“The overall tone we got in our conversations with these CIOs was more optimistic than it has been in a while,” Moskowitz said. “They have the green light to start projects that are going to take several quarters to get done. Most aren’t willing to do that when they’re worried their overall business is going to roll over.” A lot of that has to do with more confidence in the overall macroeconomic environment.

And where will that growth be? And, perhaps more importantly, where won’t it be? Software, storage and security are looking like big spending priorities among the CIOs surveyed. Business intelligence tools and getting mobile devices integrated are also high on the list — there’s that ongoing trend toward “bring your own device” (BYOD), rearing its persistent head once again.

Employee-purchased iPhones, iPads and Android devices are supplanting company-assigned BlackBerrys. “BYOD is real,” Moskowitz says. “And you have to assume that Apple is going to be the one that benefits the most from it.”

Other winners include EMC and NetApp, as they play strongly in networked storage. Server virtualization — making one physical server act like dozens of servers, using software to subdivide its resources — also has a lot of room to grow, the survey finds. That’s good news for VMware.

Losers? There are few. Intel’s new Romley chip isn’t going to be as big a deal in spurring spending on new servers: In fact,91 percent of CIOs surveyed said they don’t expect Intel’s new chip to drive new spending in the data center. Intel’s last big upgrade, Nehalem, did change the game, Moskowitz says. The trouble is, most of the companies using Nehalem-generation chips in their servers are happy with them, and are unlikely to bother with the expense of an upgrade, for now.

Nor is Windows 8 going to cause a new round of PC buying, as both Hewlett-Packard and Dell are hoping. “A new version of Windows hasn’t caused a PC upgrade cycle since 1995,” Moskowitz told me. Asked directly if Windows 8 was expected to drive a major PC upgrade cycle, 78 percent of the CIOs in the survey said no. In fact, at least 30 of the CIOs in the survey said they were still working on deploying Windows 7. Ouch. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for things to be looking up for everyone all at once.

(Image is a movie poster for the 1935 British film starring Cicely Courtneidge, but the title song in this case is, well, awful. What I really wanted was an image of Fred Astaire dancing with Joan Fontaine to the underappreciated George and Ira Gershwin tune of the same name, from the 1937 film “A Damsel in Distress,” but I could find nothing suitable. So — loving Gershwin tunes as I do — just for fun, I’ve embedded both Astaire and Billie Holiday singing the tune, below, courtesy of Grooveshark. Yes, I’ll admit, sometimes I have a little too much fun in this job.)

Those aren’t the only players, though. Samsung and Huawei make some of their own chips, while Intel is also going after this market. Quietly making inroads as well is Broadcom.

The Orange County, Calif., chipmaker has long made Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other communications chips for phones. In recent months, though, it has been able to capture a sizeable chunk of the main processor market, thanks to its chip, which combines an application processor with another key component, the communications baseband.

“Smartphones have become a significant business for Broadcom,” Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor told AllThingsD in an interview last week.

McGregor declined to get specific, but a recent J.P. Morgan report estimated that Broadcom’s baseband and application processor is now in roughly a third of Samsung’s smartphones, which it says represents three to four times what the company was doing as recently as the second half of this year.

Among the models using Broadcom’s chips are the Galaxy Y, Galaxy Mini and Galaxy Ace, J.P. Morgan said, projecting sales of about 12 million to 13 million phones per quarter, which it says could translate into $500 million in annual revenue.

Broadcom, it notes, also has about 70 percent share with most of the major smartphone and tablet makers for the chips needed to do Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. The new iPad, for example, uses Broadcom’s chips, according to an IHS iSuppli teardown of the tablet.

“Over the next few years, Broadcom should emerge as one of the top players in the mobile/cellular semiconductor market,” J.P. Morgan’s analysts said in their report.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair said he left last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona even more positive than he had been on Broadcom’s prospects.

“We have said that we believe that the biggest trend of the decade is the low-end smartphone,” Blair said in a research note. “One of the most surprising elements of this trend is how good the entry level models have become, and one of the reasons for this is Broadcom.”

Blair said that even phones that sell for $150 unsubsidized are now capable of doing what a high-end smartphone did just two years ago. The phones powered typically have a 1GHz processor and baseband and other communications and power management chips, all of which can add up to devices with $20 to $22 worth of Broadcom silicon, assuming it has all of its chips inside.

Historically, the chipmaker has mainly gone after the midrange of the market, but McGregor promised that the company will move into higher-end devices this year, as well as a bit down-market.

“We’ll cover the whole waterfront,” McGregor said. He acknowledged that the company had some catching up to do in application processors and high-end modems, such as those used in 4G phones.

Android has grown considerably, he said, though he still sees some room for other operating systems, particularly now the Microsoft has managed to get several phone makers to pay a royalty on every Android device they sell.

“One of the challenges of Android is that Microsoft is now hitting up all of the handset makers and claiming a corkage free on that dinner,” McGregor said. “I think that’s an interesting challenge for the handset industry.”

That’s the new theory being put forth by J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz, who believes the Fire will end up being a catalyst for additional iPad sales.

Moskowitz met recently with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and came away with the impression that Apple isn’t much bothered by Amazon’s new lower-priced entrant in the tablet market.

“If anything, we think that Apple views the Kindle Fire as a device that stands to bring incremental consumers to the tablet market, and here, these consumers could gravitate to more feature-rich experiences,” Moskowitz said in a note to clients. “We think that Apple is not seeing much pressure from lower-priced tablets.”

In other words, the Fire may well expand the iPad’s addressable market by drawing more price-conscious customers into it — customers who might someday upgrade to the more capable and versatile iPad.

“Given all the investor interest in the Kindle Fire, competitive risk in tablets was one focal point of our meeting,” Moskowitz said. “[But there’s] not much concern in tablet town.”

In other words, the iPad juggernaut rolls on. And while the Fire may aspire to be the No. 2 player in the tablet market, it’s got a ways to go before it gets there.

And a battle to fight, one that may require a better weapon than the Fire — according to Moskowitz, anyway.

“We think that for any vendor to wrestle momentum longer-term from Apple, a fully loaded offering is a must, and here, the current revision of the Kindle Fire falls short,” Moskowitz says. “We think that, over time, consumers may come away disappointed with the Kindle Fire’s lack of functionality and smaller screen size. In our view, the Kindle Fire is the current netbook of the media tablet market.”

The netbook of the tablet market.

That’s a harsh analogy. Netbook sales, of course, have been in decline for a while now, with many claiming the iPad is partially responsible for their deterioration. And netbooks themselves have often been disparaged as cheaply made and underpowered, often by Apple, which has long taken a dim view of the devices.

As CEO Tim Cook said in 2010: “I’ve been very clear about my view of netbooks. I think they are an experience most people will not want to continue to have. People were interested in their price, but when they got them home, they said, ‘Why did I buy this?’”

Which is not to say that consumers purchasing the Kindle Fire are asking themselves that question. The device has gotten some decent reviews, is selling well and, according to some analysts, will continue to do so throughout 2012. But it’s conceivable that the question might arise among those whose expectations were too high.

Even in a generally positive review, Walt Mossberg said of the device:

“To be clear, the Kindle Fire is much less capable and versatile than the entry-level $499 iPad 2. It has a fraction of the apps, a smaller screen, much weaker battery life, a slower Web browser, half the internal storage and no cameras or microphone. It also has a rigid and somewhat frustrating user interface far less fluid than Apple’s.”

Maybe “netbook” is a good analogy.

J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth reports back from a recent huddle with Netflix managers, and says he thinks they’re done writing checks for a while: “We believe the vast majority of Netflix’s domestic streaming spend for 2012 … has already been announced or committed. Accordingly, we would not expect Netflix to spend aggressively or announce major new deals until management has better visibility on U.S. subscriber growth.”

Anmuth gives himself some wiggle room in his prediction — it’s possible that CEO Reed Hastings still has some whopper deals he’s signed but hasn’t announced yet — but the winking and nudging seems to indicate that the checkbook has gone away.

Part of the Netflix pitch in recent months has been that it’s going to be spending a lot of money beefing up its streaming video catalog, in part because it won’t be spending it on a Starz deal that gave it access to Disney and Sony movies. And Hastings says that, increasingly, Netflix is going to be paying a premium for stuff you won’t be able to find anywhere else — it’s one of the reasons his content bill is jumping to $3.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year ago.

Recent Netflix deals include a new pact to stream DreamWorks Animation movies, which used to run on Time Warner’s HBO, and a deal to grab reruns from the CW, the broadcast joint venture between Turner and CBS. And the company has made one high-profile commitment to original content, via “House of Cards,” the Kevin Spacey/David Fincher miniseries that will run next year.

Are those kind of deals enough to keep Netflix subscribers happy, or to lure new ones back to the service? We may get some hints from Hastings and company in the next few weeks, as they hit the investor-conference circuit. Netflix CFO David Wells will appear at a Credit Suisse gathering on Nov. 29, and Hastings will speak at a UBS conference on Dec. 6.

“The company did not announce a redesigned iPhone, which many were calling an iPhone 5 and which may disappoint some investors,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a research note to clients. “That said, we believe the iPhone 4S will meet or exceed unit expectations, as it represents the first iPhone launch at two major US carriers (Verizon and Sprint) along with KDDI in Japan.”

J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz also bemoaned the lack of the so-called iPhone 5.

“We had expected the company to announce two new devices, an iPhone 5 and a 4-plus,” he said in a note to clients. “We are disappointed that Apple did not introduce a thinner form factor, but we see the feature set improvements in the iPhone 4S and the broader pricing strategy as positives.”

Moskowitz was particularly impressed with Siri, Apple’s new virtual assistant, and views it as an advantage that will raise the 4S above the pack of rivals that perpetually pursue it. “Once investors dig into Siri, we think its addition will overshadow the lack of full iPhone form factor change,” he said.

Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope took a similar view, arguing that the big news of the day was really the software that was on display. “Siri represents a more significant platform enhancement than we anticipated,” he said in a research note. “We believe this, coupled with iCloud and iOS 5, suggests today’s event represented a critical positive inflection point for the iOS platform overall.”

UBS analyst Maynard Um echoed Shope and went him one better, suggesting that the addition of Siri to the iPhone is one of those watershed innovations that will again change the way we interact with our mobile devices. “While some may be disappointed by largely unchanged design, Apple used its owned ecosystem to embed the Siri personal assistant throughout its OS to change the way we interact with phones. We believe Siri, iCloud & other iOS 5 features will continue to drive the next wave of demand.”

And in all likelihood they will. Sure, Apple did not meet some of the market’s hardware expectations. But what the market sometimes forgets is that it is software that truly differentiates Apple from its rivals.

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