Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.”

Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 (and TechCrunch). We just can’t quit you (although we’ve tried).

Some of these stats CEO David Sacks already shared with us earlier, and he also told us that sales tripled. But the 800,000 paid seats number is new.Yammer is in the process of raising a large $40 million round.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.” Bush dubs this program as the “cash for clunkers” program for health IT leaving no doubt what his opinion is regarding the legacy vendors’ solutions.

While one might dismiss this coming from a company with a dog in the fight, the feeling is nearly universal amongst doctors who are the most important users (besides patients who are almost completely ignored). Perhaps the best evidence of how abysmal legacy healthIT is, is that even the market leader is having trouble getting medical practices to adopt their software despite huge subsidies from large health systems. In the course of discussions with large health systems, they often proudly shared the deployment of a mega EMR and how they were offering subsidies to affiliated physicians to adopt the same system. When pressed about how broadly it was being adopted by non-employee physicians (i.e., MDs who have a choice), the penetration was staggeringly low — 2/10 of one percent was the average of those who shared figures. This was despite the fact that they were subsidizing 85% of the cost (the maximum allowed by Stark Law).

When I’ve spoken with physicians who have rejected the entreaties from their affiliated health systems, it’s more than the expense (even after a massive subsidy, it’s still several thousand dollars plus monthly costs). Rather, the complexity and lack of user friendliness is the bigger driver.

HealthIT Vendors Reflect Flawed Reimbursement Model
All of this begs the question, “why is HealthIT so bad that massive government and health system subsidies are required to drive adoption?” And how can this possibly be good news? Let me address the issues and then I’ll conclude with the good news. While it may seem easy to bash legacy HealthIT vendors, my experience has been that vendors reflect their customers. I would take this a step further. In the case of healthcare, customers reflect the reimbursement model. It’s a reimbursement model that is so broken Americans pay nearly twice as much as other countries to get inferior outcomes.

The “do more, bill more” reimbursement model in the U.S. has been at the root of healthcare’s hyperinflation (fun fact: while what we spend on all other goods and services has increased 8x since the 60′s, healthcare costs have skyrocketed 274x). The byproduct is a focus on activity rather than value/outcome, the primary IT focus has been how you can get more bills out faster. Despite the fact that most physicians call the patient the most important member of the care team, in reality, the “patient” as architected into most HealthIT has been little more than a vessel to attach billing codes to.

More recently, there’s been a drive to add so-called Patient Portals to involve the patient. However, these have been more driven by marketing objectives than truly rethinking the care delivery model. Making the patients central in a system designed for optimizing billing is even less likely than Yahoo or Microsoft surpassing Facebook in social networking. Both require a different architecture from the ground up. As I wrote earlier, EMR portals are like driving a 747 to the grocery store — it can get you there but it’s going to be far more expensive and complex than necessary.

Convoluted Decisions Processes Have Killed Great Products
When I’m asked why I didn’t get back in to healthcare sooner, I share with them a story from my past. I was at a well recognized hospital implementing their patient accounting system and we needed to decide the unique patient identifier scheme. It’s an important decision, but they were in year seven of debating what the new scheme should be! It may seem like an absurd example, but it’s indicative of how interminable and almost crazy the decision processes can be in a health system. It virtually guarantees that the only companies that can survive those processes are incumbent vendors — breakthrough young companies die on the vine waiting those processes out. If you wonder why MUMPS is still widely used in healthcare, it’s because old vendors, and old technology persists in healthcare.

Separation of Consumptive User and Economic Buyer
The role of Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) is relatively new and long overdue. The idea is a senior level physician plays an integral role in IT decision processes. However, there are still many scenarios where the people who will actually use software are a great distance from those who pay for the software. In other industries, the rise of SaaS software has closed or eliminated this gap where you see individuals and departments not waiting around for IT to pick something that they don’t want to use. Rather, they can directly contract with the technology company. This has only just begun in healthcare.

There was a parallel scenario 10-15 years ago when multi-million dollar CRM implementations from companies like Siebel weren’t embraced the way Salesforce.com has been embraced today. A key driver of this is the user of Salesforce.com is often only a step removed from the purchaser.

One Item For Which HealthIT Vendors are Fully Responsible
Most of the items above put the root cause at the provider level. However, there persists one insidious practice. There are various ways to ensure customers stick around as long as possible — lock-in or loyalty. Successful SaaS businesses are built on the loyalty model. Rather than holding data hostage or locking customers into long agreements, they believe that the more freedom you give customers, the more loyal they become (assuming you deliver the goods). In contrast, there’s still the old model of lock-in used in many HealthIT vendors. For example, they make it expensive and/or difficult to get access to data in a system to keep any in-house or 3rd party built system from being integrated. These vendors pull it over on naive customers by telling them that it’s a ton of work when it’s only a ton of work if that vendor is incompetent. Like escaping an abusive relationship, healthcare providers must take action or else they reward that behavior.

The Good News

Tectonic shifts are underway. Smart healthcare providers are trying to avoid making the same mistakes newspaper companies made in the late 90′s. For those of us used to the convoluted, interminable decision processes of the past, it is breathtaking to see the decision processes of today. As I detailed in the Rise of Nimble Medicine, not only are entrepreneurial ventures popping up like weeds, healthcare providers are getting far more aggressive about trying new models without doing the equivalent of organizing the Roman Legions.

Naturally, when a project is hugely expensive and will take months to implement, it’s going to lead to a longer decision process. However, the principles we see in agile software development, are spreading to healthcare delivery. I’ve seen scenarios, such as in telehealth, where the time from initially seeing technology to moving into implementation takes less than a week. The startups that are adept at finding the nimble organizations will have great success. The reward for healthcare providers in rationalizing their decision processes is they will no longer have to settle for rigid software that is difficult to implement.

The best news for healthtech startups is that, by definition, legacy HealthIT is optimized around the flawed reimbursement model of the past. The disruptive innovators instinctually know that they will either have to build their own software (if there isn’t off-the-shelf software) or they can work with software companies that allow them to be nimble. There is universal agreement that anything less than a fundamental redesign of healthcare will fall short in solving the most important problem the U.S. and the world faces — spiraling healthcare costs.

Related story:
Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare

Numecent, a stealth startup building a patented “cloudpaging” technology, just raised $2 million in Series A funding from undisclosed corporate investors. The $2 million tranche is a part of a larger $10 million funding round, and is in addition to the $7.5 million in seed funding the company has already raised from private investors. Exact details as to what Numecent is developing are not known, beyond a general description of what “cloudpaging” means, as provided by the company.

The term “cloudpaging,” says Numecent, refers to a specific (and patented) “push-pull” paging technology which allows software instructions and data to be demand-paged from the cloud in real-time. The company claims that cloudpaging will allow any software, app or game to pull this data on-demand to any connected device in a secure, metered and virtualized fashion. The company is even positioning cloudpaging as the successor to streaming, and holds 10 patents for application streaming and virtualization through its subsidiary, Endeavours Technologies. It’s also worth mentioning that Endeavors Technologies was spun out of a think tank for a DARPA project.

Numecent is also now claiming to have high-profile testers who have begun to deploy its hybrid-cloud solution in mission-critical environments. The company plans to exit stealth in March, at which time the company will reveal more details about the cloudpaging technology itself and how it’s being used.

Alongside the funding news, Numecent also announced that Osman Kent, previously the co-founder of 3Dlabs, has joined the company as the new CEO.

Earlier this month, Numecent launched an “application jukebox” for Red Hat, which allows traditional Windows applications to be delivered to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-hosted desktops.

Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.

Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data.

similar to other cloud based data management offerings, Sumo Logic wants to eliminate the need for expensive on premise-based log management applications. Using algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a massive scale. We’re told the service can analyze terabytes of log-data a day.

Sumo Logic’s architecture features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages and analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into valuable operational insights in real time. The cloud-based service is powered by Sumo Logic’s Elastic Log Processing, which is a scalable architecture that enables log analytics at a large scale; and LogReduce, which are a set of adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.

The platform also features real-time interactive forensics and push analytics to provide proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies in data. Sumo Logic’s service also mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.

As Beedgen explains, there is a major opportunity behind providing a cloud-based alternative to log management because enterprises have real problems managing and analyzing log and machine data. He says existing products can suck in data but have poor analytics and data analyzation with too many false positives.

Sumo Logic has an innovative approach, he says, because it provides a scalable elastic architecture, applied machine learning for IT intelligence, and the horsepower to process massive amounts of IT data.

The new funding will be used towards expanding engineering and marketing. Sumo Logic faces competition from Splunk, which just filed for an IPO.

Online content, portal and front-end technology solution Synacor filed its amended S-1 today for an IPO looking to raise $75 million. The filing revealed that this month Synacor acquired Carbyn, an HTML5 operating system that lets users put their files, applications and more in the cloud and access them from any device’s browser. It paid $1.1 million in total for the company, with $600,000 paid up front with $500,000 to be delivered in April 2013, and it hired 7 Carbyn employees.

The companies are a great fit, a veritable match made in the cloud. Synacor helps telecom and cable service providers set up websites on its managed, hosted platform where their customers can access ”e-mail, security, online games, music and authentication of TV Everywhere”. That means Synacor already handles all your web-based, and TV services, but is missing what lives on your OS. Carbyn’s OS that can be accessed from anwhere will fill this gap and let Synacor’s clients provide their customers with an expansive set of services in a single-sign on package.

Major stockholders of Synacor who will each be selling about a quarter of their shares include Intel Corporation, Walden International, Crystal Internet Ventures, Advantage Capital Partners, and North Atlantic Capital. These companies all contributed to Synacor’s $17 million Series C round in 2006. Some additional facts from the filing include:

As mobile demand for access to television and OS-based content increases, Carbyn should become an increasingly valuable component of Synacor. The Ontario-based Carbyn started just a year ago, and the founders said it was looking for its first funding when it made waves in September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Seems like Synacor picked up Carbyn’s anywhere OS at just the right time.

See Carbyn’s technology in action below:

Solera Networks just announced that it has raised $20 million in Series D funding from Intel Capital (the chip-maker’s investment arm) and others.

The company says its DeepSee Platform can index and classify all network traffic, giving companies a comprehensive picture of their network security in real-time, either for spotting risks before a security breach or responding quickly once a breach has occurred. Both domestic and international sales supposedly grew more than 100 percent last year.

Previous investors Allegis Capital, Signal Peak Ventures, and Trident Capital also participated in the new round. Solera says it will use the money to expand global sales, marketing, and product development. It also notes that Intel’s expertise should help with future product improvements.

“With increasingly large amounts of data crossing corporate networks, organizations must balance advanced threat prevention with an aggressive and proactive response system to be fully prepared when an inevitable breach occurs,” said Intel Capital Investment Director Sean Cunningham in the funding press release. “We see companies continuing to realize that real-time, intelligent incident response is now an essential component of their security strategy. Solera Networks delivers a scalable, high-performance solution that addresses these challenges and is the only independent platform capable of broad integration.”

Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of Microsoft’s messaging platform.

The addition comes at no extra cost to current subscribers of the Office 365 suite or the standalone Exchange Online offering, and supports any BlackBerry devices, whether on a business or consumer data plan.

Once enabled, the managed BlackBerry smartphones will be able to sync with Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data. BlackBerry Balance, a new technology that helps admins manage the corporate data on the device, while leaving personal data untouched, will also be available with this new offering. I.T. will be able to manage the phones using a web-based console, but employees will have access to self-service tools for password and device resets, remote lock and remote wipe functions.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is live now in 50 countries. More info is here.

Partnerships like this are one of the reasons why some mobile industry insiders believe that RIM could be a viable acquisition target for Microsoft. The companies are already working so closely together to integrate their technologies, and both share a similar end user customer base: the enterprise market. Reports that RIM has even engaged in takeover talks with Microsoft emerged in December, but nothing has yet to come of that. Instead, the company’s recent moves like the co-CEO step-down and (misguided) statements from new CEO Thorsten Heins (“I don’t think any drastic change is needed”) imply that company is attempting a turnaround, not putting itself on the auction block. At least for now.

Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.

DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.

The other companies in the DMARC working group are AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, and Trusted Domain Project.

The move follows an announcement in November that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Agari were authenticating emails from Facebook, YouSendIt, and other e-commerce companies and social networks.

DMARC said the anti-phishing initiative has actually been going on for the last 18 months.

According to Google, about 15 percent of all e-mail comes from members of DMARC, but by published their DMARC records, these records can not be domain spoofed. This makes the anti-phising group much more effective at stopping criminal gangs from using phasing to dupe unsuspecting users.

DMARC.org plans to submit the DMARC specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardisation.

So perhaps we’ll start to see the ending of phishing once and for all.

In 2011, Sony had several major security breaches: Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures, and Playstation Network all were attacked and private data was successfully stolen. Their handling of the attacks, particularly the larger PSN one, was widely criticized.

Many users are either unaware or acutely aware of how many sites and services have financially or personally sensitive information on record. Events like the Sony hacks do not reassure them, and actions like Google’s yesterday (though arguably innocuous) may alarm them. Users want more control and more security.

And the EU is looking to give it to them. But with the threat of enormous fines, many companies will find that the most logical thing to do is move away from the entire business of storing and serving user identities.

It’s a simple fact that maintaining a database of a hundred thousand or a million (or far more) active users is a serious engineering problem in both software and hardware. Keeping things secure but still accessible, staying abreast of new regulations (like those proposed in the EU), providing localized support on billing and user data issues — it’s quite a task. Web enrollment in software and services is growing at a huge rate, and many products and “real” items such as cars and banks are increasingly reliant on online services as well. It’s been happening for a long time, sure. But the stresses are starting to get out of hand.

If you’re a car company, or a movie distribution service, or a game publisher, the process of keeping and tracking your users securely is becoming too great of a portion of your business. And with increased regulation and requirements like the EU’s (which some are calling “onerous” and a “tax” on businesses that keep electronic records, but are probably nevertheless inevitable), it’s not something on which they can get by with minimal effort.

So what will happen? The same thing that happens whenever a part of an industry begins to outgrow its role: new, dedicated companies sprout up and the world offloads the task onto them.

This already happens to some extent, of course. It’s not like every company in the world maintains an independent and proprietary database of its users. There are services and software for this purpose, and the user-management business is plenty real already.

But for the millions and millions of people and accounts still internally managed (numbers that are growing worldwide in any market you can think of as online services gain more traction), the situation no longer makes sense. Why should a company that runs a movie distribution service also be running a world-class user-management service? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like a restaurant making its own forks.

It was logical for a while that data related to Sony services should reside on Sony servers, administrated by Sony. But in a day where our logins transcend sites, and everything we do is personalized, that no longer really rings true — to Sony, that is. Regular humans want to go to a site, put in their user name and password, and have their data retrieved. They don’t really care if the data is served by Sony or a third-party site because it’s never said one way or the other.

But for Sony and companies like it, the increasingly expensive and complicated user-management part of their business is starting to look like an attractive target for spinning off to third-party services. And third-party services are going to start revving their engines to attract these user-weary multinationals. This doesn’t apply to services like Instagram and Spotify, naturally; they’re account-focused to begin with.

It will be much easier for a company built from the ground up for user databases to handle these requirements and adjust to local laws. They can do it faster, better, and cheaper than an internal team, and compete directly with each other. It’ll be good for the user data sector and good for the multinationals hoping to offload this burden. Not to mention good for the users: the EU regulations require fast turnaround on data, instant notification of security breaches, and impose heavy fines for abusive or neglectful companies. Sony wants to worry about the quality of its games and devices, not about whether each of its 20 internal user-tracking divisions is jumping through legal hoops.

Secure account management isn’t the most exciting business, but you better believe it’s going to show some serious growth over the next few years, and everyone will gain by it.

While there were some big IPOs in 2011, Zynga and Groupon among them, overall it was a disappointing year for IPOs. Will 2012 be any different? Guidewire Software certainly hopes so. Back in September, the insurance software company joined MobiTV, Angie’s List, Brightcove, and Jive, filing its S-1, announcing plans to raise up to $100 million and to sell approximately 7.5 million shares at $10 to $12 per share, in advance of its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “GWRE.”

Guideware ended up exceeding its initial targets, pricing its IPO yesterday above its target range at $13 a share, selling 8.85 million shares and raising $115 million. The company has officially begun trading on the NYSE this morning — after granting underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.3 million additional shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any — and again proceeded to beat expectations. Guidewire stock jumped to $16.75 upon its first trade, up 29 percent. Since, it has gone as high as $18, and currently sits at around $17.25 per share.

Founded in 2001, the San Mateo, California-based company is a software vendor for insurance companies that provide property, casualty and workers compensation to their customers. The company offers a web-based claims system that supports personal, commercial, and workers’ compensation insurance, and enterprise app for coordinating and executing transactions, as well as underwriting and policy administrations systems for these carriers. In other words, Guidewire has sought to enable insurance companies to replace their core legacy systems and automate their businesses through web-based software.

After struggling through not-so-profitable early years, the software company managed to turn a profit in the last two years, seeing its first quarterly profit in 2010. In fiscal 2011, revenues rose to $172 million, with the company seeing a net income of $35.6 million compared to $15.5 million in fiscal 2010 — although current financials are not as strong, as revenues have been on the decline in recent quarters. That being said, sales increased 51 percent to $52.4 million in the most recent quarter, perhaps due to a loyal customer base, as Chief Executive Marcus S. Ryu told the WSY, “No customer has ever left Guidewire. That gives us a lot of security, and allows us to plan our budgeting and investing.”

While the company counts more than 100 customers, including major insurance companies like Nationwide, CNA and American Family Insurance, Guidewire believes that the available market for their software is far bigger. Gartner, for example, found that insurance carriers spent $4 billion on software and $10.5 billion on IT services in 2010, and many of those are still using outdated technology systems.

And in another good sign for Guidewire, according to the Wall Street Journal, two of its leading investors, U.S. Venture Partners and Bay Partners, have indicated that they are not interested in selling, but buying more stock — as many as 400,000 shares of common stock at its IPO price.

The company is seeing some strong adoption of its software, especially its claims system, and both profits and sales are on the rise. Thus, the immediate outlook for Guideware seems positive, so keep an eye on its stock this week — it, too, may be on the rise.

Enterprise software company TIBCO is debuting a new version of its Yammer-clone Tibbr today. The newest version of the company’s social communications app includes geo-location capabilities called Tibbr GEO, which integrates the ‘check-in’ model in the enterprise.

By incorporating location into Tibbr, the service wants to physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As Tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information.

For example, Tibbr says the geolocation feature could turn a gate into a contextual relevant data hub to give agents, pilots and flight attendants insights as they approach the gate. Or the section of every retail aisle could include data on individual shelf space, insights about individual products, how they’re selling, how fast they’re moving or how a new location might be affecting sales.

Tibbr Mobile applications now use HTML5 to deliver users a consistent mobile experience across all platforms and has also been updated to support offline access.

Venture capital firm Battery Ventures this morning announced that it has made an investment in Continuuity, a stealth ‘big data’ startup founded by Battery entrepreneur-in-residence Todd Papaioannou (formerly VP and Chief Cloud Architect for Yahoo).

Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and a group of angel investors including Bob Pasker, Paul Ambrose, Matt Ocko and The Data Collective also participated in the round.

It’s unclear what Continuuity is building, and the press release makes us none the wiser:

Continuuity’s goal is to enable the development of the next wave of real-time Big Data applications.

Ok then. Here’s a recent video interview of Papaioannou talking about trends in big data:

According to a new report from managed enterprise mobility provider Good Technology, iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) hold the top three spots in the list of the top 10 enterprise activations by device type. The report includes data gathered by Good for Q4 2011 and includes half of the Fortune 100, providing insight into enterprise activation trends among some of the world’s biggest businesses.

The company found that despite Android’s overall market share growth and steady absolute growth among Good’s customers, only 35% of all smartphone activations were on Android, compared with iPhone’s 65%.

The mid-October release of the iPhone 4S helped that particular device quickly earn the number one position on the top 10 enterprise activations list, with the iPhone 4 moving into spot #2. The iPad 2, meanwhile, claimed the third position.

Since there are far more Android devices than iPhone models, it’s not as fair to compare trends on a device-by-device basis. After all, there’s aren’t just a couple models of Android phones out there – there are dozens upon dozens of “top” (popular) devices.

However, even when looked at as a whole, Android activations accounted for just 35% of the smartphone activations and only 6% of tablet activations. The Samsung Galaxy S II was the top Android device at spot #6 and was followed by the Motorola Droid Bionic, the Motorola Droid 3, Sprint EVO 4G (Q3′s most popular Android device) and the Motorola Droid X2. Motorola phones were popular over the course of the past year, too, and were represented in the top 10 each quarter.

Good does note that iPhone activations had slowed in the previous quarter, in anticipation of the new iPhone, then jumped significantly after its launch, with 31% of smartphone activations from that device alone. But collectively, iOS devices accounted for over 70% of all activations in Q4, an indication that enterprise customers’ iOS preference wasn’t just being boosted by the iPhone 4S launch. iOS is the preferred choice in the enterprise, Good says.

On the tablet front, iOS’s domination is even more apparent – the iPad and iPad 2 account for 94% of the total tablet activations in Q4, compared with 6% for Android tablets, where the Galaxy Tab leads the pack. iPads were most popular in three industries: financial services (accounting for 42% for the quarter), business/professional services and life sciences.

Going into Q1 and Q2, Good says that it expects iPad and iPad 2 activations to slow heading into March, as customers prepare for the (rumored) launch of the iPad 3. It also expects Android activations to increase on a relative basis after the immediate impact of the iPhone 4S lessens and as BYOD (bring your own device) programs become more common.

However, says John Herrema, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Good, the company expects the iOS/Android numbers to be roughly the same during the first half of 2012 as they are now. A change would require a major shift in tablet trends. “I don’t see that happening with the iPad 3 on the horizon,” says Herrema.

“If Android and iOS split smartphone [market share] or even if Android takes the overall smartphone lead, it would still likely be no more than 40% of all Good activations overall, given the dominance of Apple on tablets and the large numbers of tablets we are activating. Meanwhile, I don’t see Android dropping substantially below where it is now because that would require major shift among BYOD smartphone users.”

We should note that this report does not look at RIM devices or Windows Phone, as Good doesn’t have insight into these platforms. This is only a comparison between the iOS/Android adoption rates in the enterprise, which by itself, limits itself to enterprise environments where BlackBerry has already fallen from favor.

A new poll of over 11,000 workers worldwide by Ipsos and Reuters shows that telecommuting is an increasingly popular choice, especially in non-Western countries. This will come as no surprise to many, but the numbers are higher than some might have guessed. Over 30 percent of workers in India, Mexico, and Indonesia claimed to telecommute regularly, and one in ten overall work from home every day.

It’s tempting to call any work that can be done via telecommute “knowledge work” or the like, but there isn’t enough of that to create these kinds of numbers. The internet has been so incredibly enabling in so many different ways that to limit it to such a narrow category is shortsighted. Many are doing web design or creating product themselves, certainly, but many are also managing entire “virtual” businesses, handling email chains with the Chinese manufacturers on one end and the Singapore design guys on the other, or keeping track of orders and customer queries via an online clearing house. There is very little that can be done in an office that must be done in an office, and worldwide in developing markets the cost savings of that fact are being welcomed with open arms.

Interestingly, it is in already-productive countries like Germany, Sweden, and Japan that telecommuting is viewed with suspicion. On one hand it is surprising: these highly wired and progressive countries are welcoming of technology in so many forms that it seems unlike them to reject it in this one. But part of their success is in their social infrastructure: cities, factories, offices, large companies in business for decades or even centuries. Telecommuting makes labor unit-based and decentralizes, preventing the kind of top-down regulation that they feel (and are certainly justified in feeling) has contributed so much to their prosperity.

The personal benefits and professional problems with telecommuting were not ignored: 65 percent of those polled felt that telecommuting allowed them to be more productive because they have more control over their work life. But 62 percent found it “socially isolating” and worried that lack of face time at the office would lessen their chances of promotion.

As a telecommuter myself, I am concerned more with the lack of infrastructure in place to deal with significant numbers of critical telecommuting employees. Just try to record a Skype video conversation between a three or four people, or give a presentation to 100 off-site employees and 200 on-site ones. There are solutions, of course, but many are expensive and industrial-size, requiring special equipment and software from Cisco or another enterprise enabler. Companies like Boeing may have settled the global collaboration problem, but what about a 12-person operation spread across Europe and Canada that makes camera accessories?

Just as services have enabled one relatively tech-naive person to become an online business (and continue to do so), new services over the next few years will have to focus on repairing the natural loss that occurs when your employees are never physically near each other. The numbers, as shown by the huge numbers in emerging markets, are huge and getting bigger, and the big money in established countries is still waiting for the right moment to jump in. Collaboration tools and startups have been big at Disrupt and other showcases, and for good reason. The next ten years of global productivity are going to be driven by them.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Images are courtesy of Jason Hwang, M.D., M.B.A.  Executive Director, Healthcare of the Innosight Institute and co-author of The Innovator’s Prescription.

In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of small innovations ultimately led to the transformation of farming, so too is a rapidly building wave of innovative new care and payment models leading to similar breakthroughs in healthcare. I call this Nimble Medicine.

Traditionally, attempting a new care or payment model meant long planning and development cycles. The cost and complexity of testing new models prevented many from being tried. Even today, the leading HealthIT vendor is known to charge $100 million and up for its software. Amazingly, they require three months of training before they even let people use the software.  This is a vestige of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement particularly given that healthcare is a supply-driven market (e.g., MDs who own a stake in imaging equipment order scans at three times the rate of MDs who don’t). Spending nine figures doesn’t sound so bad when you have capital projects planned in excess of $1 Billion. Perhaps we should refer to the legacy model as the “build more, do more, bill more” model. Any health analyst will tell you that the cure for healthcare’s hyperinflation is NOT building more healthcare facilities. It’s as if a fire department argued that the way to solve a wave of structural fires was to buy more fire fighting equipment. Yes, that might help, however there’s a much more cost-effective approach such as having buildings inspected for fire prevention capabilities.

In their book, The Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen and Dr. Jason Hwang point out how applying technology into old business models has only raised costs.

In contrast, disruptive innovators such as WhiteGlove Health and Qliance rethought the care delivery and payment models from the ground up. Their results have been impressive. For example, Qliance has Net Promoter Scores higher than Google or Apple, while reducing the direct costs of healthcare (i.e., their service coupled with a high deductible wrap-around policy) 20-40%. More impressively, they have reduced the most expensive downstream costs (surgical, specialist and emergency visits) 40-80%. Likewise, WhiteGlove Health already has 500,000 members and has more 5-star reviews on CitySearch than any other organization in the country. In WhiteGlove’s S-1 filing, they highlight the importance of proprietary software they have developed to give them a cost and consumer experience advantage.

The next wave of disruptive innovators are taking advantage of second-mover advantage as the wave of healthtech startups provide them off-the-shelf software that is an order of magnitude less investment than the first wave of innovators. It’s a couple orders of magnitude less expensive than legacy HealthIT. More importantly for the innovators is the speed that they can not only stand up the new technology but also easily iterate based on real world experience. Rather than months or years, it’s hours or days. This is a key component of Nimble Medicine.

Consider the following scenarios: [Disclosure, my company, provides some of the technology components underlying these models which is why I have visibility into their strategy.]

For those of us in the technology industry, there’s striking parallels with what has happened in technology where centralization was followed by decentralization. For providers, lessons can be drawn regarding how some organizations were able to make the transition from one generation to the next while many others faded from the landscape. The graphic below depicts the transition from the slide rule to the mainframe and then back out to mobile devices.

In an earlier piece (Healthcare Field of Dreams In Idaho: Health System Opens Innovation Center), I highlighted an innovation group that is building the next “hospital” – a hospital without walls. Unlike a massive capital project necessary to build a traditional hospital, I expect that new “wings” of the virtual hospital will get built via a series of smaller projects. They have hired entrepreneurial people to bring the agility necessary in this new approach. This is a great example of Nimble Medicine.

Related articles:

Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare

Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes

Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. “We are effectively Salesforce but social,” he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle).

“We have spent time interviewing their dev team,” says Ferrara. “A lot of the stuff they are talking about, they don’t have. Even if they were to build a product, their margins are razor thin and they are getting hammered.”

Not only is Ferrara talking to Salesforce’s dev team, he just hired away the product director who made Chatter Mobile, Jason McDowall, who will now head up the team building Nimble’s mobile apps.

Nimble isn’t going up against Salesforce head-on. That would be stupid. Instead, it is trying to nail the social component of business communications. Nimble is an enterprise social platform built around contacts, calendars, and communictaions (both internal and external). It ties together email with social streams (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and puts it all into one interconnected database.

“CRM tools are not about communications,” says Ferrara. “It is a management tool, a way for managers to keep a hand around the neck of managers. CRM doesn’t tell you anything, you have to tell it everything.”

A better way to think of Nimble is as a social contact and communications database which ties into other enterprise and social services. Today, it pulls in messages from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With its next release, it will pull integrate with HubSpot (which turns website visitors into sales leads), Infochimps (datasets), and WuFoo (online forms).

The list of planned integrations includes Get Satisfaction, Yammer, Zendesk, Assistly, Quickbooks, and Freshbooks.

The more data Nimble can ingest about your customers, the more it can do with that data in the future. Ferrara’s goal is to make Nimble the “Pandora of contacts”—you put in two names, and it will spit put other contacts like those people. It will ingest your company’s social graph and tell you who you are close to, who is slipping away, and who you should be talking to that you are not.

For Ferrar, this goes way beyond CRM. “Hiring a social media person for the company won’t work,” he says. “The conversation is so vast everyone needs to be a part of it.”

Ferrara built Nimble with $2 million of his own money and 20 developers over two years. He just recently raised a $1 million seed round from Mark Cuban, Google Ventures, and others.

Nimble is still in beta and about to roll out a major upgrade in February which it will start charging for (first 500 people to register here will get 90 days free).

Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.

Weather II is a strategic shareholder in telecommunications companies. Most notably, it holds a 20% stake in Vimpelcom, the world’s sixth largest mobile telecommunications group by subscribers. Joyent states that Weather II was advised in the round by investment and management group Accelero Capital. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies in telecom and enterprise markets.

“We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is providing solutions to some of the toughest problems in cloud computing, such as cloud performance, resiliency and security,” said Khaled Bichara, co-CEO of Accelero Capital.

Meanwhile, Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital praised how Joyent’s technology would fit perfectly with technologies it has developed in-house and its own cloud services model.

Joyent’s cloud software suite SmartDataCenter is used by developers and enterprises worldwide. With JoyentCloud.com, the company provides public cloud services to a number of well-known companies, including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Dell and Kabam. It’s also the steward of the open source server-side JavaScript project Node.js, a runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps, and a contributor to Joyent SmartOS, an open source project which powers the commercial software SmartDataCenter.

According to David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent, the new funding will enable Joyent to “build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.”

Throughout 2012, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent, the company says.

The San Francisco-based company had previously raised $5 million in September, which brought it close to $30 million total. The company’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.

Mykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.

New investors include Ironport founder Scott Banister, Jeff Clarke (executive chairman of Travelport, chairman of Orbitz and board member of Red Hat) and Mike Jones (founder and CEO of Clover Capital).

Mykonos’s Web Security product uses deception to “detect, confuse, slow down and prevent attackers” in real-time in order to help companies protect their websites and Web apps from malicious hacker and proactively prevent fraud and theft.

Just recently, the company moved its headquarters to the heart of Silicon Valley – they also have offices in New York.

Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly is today announcing the launch of Bitly Enterprise 2.0, a new version of its enterprise-friendly dashboard. The Bitly Enterprise platform, which helps businesses with multiple social media accounts monitor the impacts of their content’s distribution, will now include the first production release of the company’s brand-new search technology, allowing customers to track content around any subject or phrase across the entire social web – not just Twitter and Facebook.

This technology is providing access to a new view of the web. The web is no longer just a list of linked pages, but a web of fresh, social and viral content that’s weighted and ranked in real-time, and, in many cases, before Google applies its own PageRank to it.

Bitly’s social search engine is able to track the entire Bitly universe, explains CEO Peter Stern, which includes billions of pieces of content, with around 15 million unique pieces from over 100 million shares added daily.

When Bitly shortens a URL, it also crawls and classifies the URL. These links form an index of the most viral content on the web, which, through the Enterprise product, allow businesses and brands to see which items (posts, tweets, articles, etc.) are getting attention.

The new search technology was originally launched into beta testing in October, with the first part being a sentiment analysis system with alerts. Today’s dashboard update includes that feature, as well as tools for managing multiple accounts (Bitly Composer) and message optimization. The latter lets customers automatically share content at precisely the right time, based on when it will be most relevant to the audience and most likely to drive traffic. (For more details, see Bitly’s blog post).

One of the key benefits to the service is that Bitly’s technology doesn’t just track social mentions – it predicts the future, too. For any given search query, Bitly predicts which stories will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. And the company uses its own analytics to make these predictions in real-time. That sort of thing is invaluable to businesses and brands who need to be able to see a shift in sentiment (especially a negative one) before it’s too late. It can also help identify good content that a brand could choose to promote as well as provide ways to view content’s popularity by region, domain or social platform.

In truth, Bitly’s social search engine can be understood as being something like a “Google,” but for the social web. Instead of tracking webpages, Bitly tracks topics. And instead of PageRank, it has its own ranking parameters (17 in all), the most critical of which is, of course, clicks. It also tracks where those clicks are from, the platforms being used, the quality of the sources (i.e. organic vs. inorganic sources) and more.

“The larger story here,” explains Stern, “…is that we’re taking a view of the web not from a link-based point of view…it’s above link-level, page-level or even domain-level analytics.” It’s a different view of a different web than the one Google sees.

What’s most interesting this, is how much of a long tail there is to it. Bitly got its start as the preferred link-shortening service for Twitter (before Twitter launched its own), but the company is no longer limited to tracking Twitter. In fact, Twitter is just 8% of the company’s traffic, and Facebook is just 7%. Today, people are clicking and engaging with Bitly-powered links all over the web. There are over 100,000 in-code sources within applications, for example, plus web-based sharing buttons, links shared in virtual worlds, links shared through texting, within chat, even within games like Minecraft.

Says Stern, the company hasn’t yet considered building a consumer-facing service for its social search technology, but it could if there was interest. (YES THERE IS). Given Google’s decision to forgo a realtime search vertical in favor of promotion of in-house content from Google+, it seems that now would be the time for such an offering, if ever.

Below, a majorly cool video of Bitly traffic throughout the world, which shows the geographic location of the click and keywords associated with the content. Whoa.

Bitly: World Vis (2 / 3) from Micha Gorelick on Vimeo.

The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.

A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” we find that a substantial number of enterprise users “expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it.” Less than half of respondents are planning to use Windows to handle their “Big Data” requirements.

While nearly 80% of respondents expect an increase in the number of Linux deployments in their organizations over the next five years, only 21.7% of those surveyed expect an increase in the number of Windows servers during the same time frame.

Perceived technical barriers to enterprise Linux adoption have dropped significantly, too. Only 12.2% of respondents cited technical issues as an impediment to success, down from 20.3% from the last survey. That says a lot about the overall value proposition for Linux installations.

It’s worth remembering, though, that this was an invitation-only survey. I’m sure a similar survey from Microsoft would yield results more pleasing to Redmond. Nonetheless, Linux is clearly at the vanguard of technical innovation, both for the traditional enterprise data center as well as for nascent cloud computing solutions.