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.

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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.

Entrepreneurial epiphanies surface in random places. For Eric Page, it was watching Brad Pitt’s latest movie, Moneyball. The epiphany caused him to shift Amplify Health’s business model from a provider of technology to a heavy user of technology. While there is a wave of disruptive technology in healthtech, as interesting is the wave of disruptive innovation on the care delivery side of healthcare. These companies aren’t technology companies, however technology plays a pivotal role.

Previously, Page had been the Founder & President of REM Medical, a clinic for sufferers of sleep apnea. A key part of any sleep clinic’s service is prescribing CPAP machines. The problem is that the percentage of people who actually follow-through is quite low (40%) even though the results can dramatically improve one’s life. A series of behavioral insights, often applied through the use of technology allowed REM Medical to double the industry average adherence to 79%. As healthcare shifts from a “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement to a value and outcomes-based model, these kinds of results will separate the winners from the losers. Amplify Health’s original vision was to package the behavioral insights in software and sell them to providers.

With the success of his previous company, Page thought it would be easy to sell this vision to healthcare providers. Unfortunately, many healthcare providers are making the same mistakes that newspaper companies made in the late 90’s. That is, they aren’t moving as quickly as circumstances dictate. The problem is that urgency is sometimes only evident in hindsight. This is what led to the Moneyball epiphany.

For those who haven’t seen the movie or read the book, Moneyball tells the story of how Major League Baseball’s Oakland A’s Billy Beane (the team’s General Manager) was faced with a payroll that was one-third the size of their competition. Beane realized he needed to come up with a different way of picking players or he’d lose bidding wars against richer teams. For over 20 years, baseball statistician Bill James had proffered theories of baseball statistics that flew in the face of conventional wisdom on what statistics best represented a player’s value to a team. James was ignored until Billy Beane came along. He applied James’ theories with great success regularly fielding playoff teams that had one-third to one-half the payroll of the teams they competed against.

While watching Moneyball, Page had the realization that he had been acting like Bill James evangelizing his theories. Even with a successful track record, he wasn’t getting the traction he desired. Instead, he decided he should become Billy Beane and apply his knowledge to his own company. Rather than monetize via a software licensing model, Amplify Health will be in the onsite clinic segment delivering primary care and managing chronic conditions. [See DIY Health Reform: Employers Solving Healthcare Crisis One Onsite Clinic At A Time for more on onsite clinics.]

Amplify Health isn’t alone in this trend. Other examples include MedLion, One Medical Group, Qliance and White Glove Health [Disclosure: MedLion is a customer of Avado's]. These are healthcare providers who’ve applied technology to enhance their competitive advantage. Traditional healthcare providers should be on notice about these types of disruptive innovators. After all, in the late 90’s the newspaper companies were worried about other media competitors and big players such as Microsoft. What devastated their business models was an array of niche competitors who bit by bit hollowed out chunks of their business. Companies such as Monster.com, eBay, Cars.com, Zillow, Craigslist and many others. Like newspapers that were oligopolies or monopolies, many large health systems haven’t been faced with the level of competition that is emerging. As William Gibson has stated, “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

By definition, the legacy HealthIT vendors have optimized their solutions around the legacy reimbursement and delivery models that have created the hyperinflation in healthcare crushing family, business and government budgets. The exciting aspect of this for the healthtech startup community is entire new categories of software are emerging to support disruptive innovation taking place on the care delivery side. Even more promising is that many providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies have set up innovation groups. I wrote about one earlier — Healthcare Field of Dreams In Idaho: Health System Opens Innovation Center. An array of new models are being tested at organizations such as Horizon Health Innovations, Catholic Health West, Trinity Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, Catholic Health Partners, Blue Shield of California and many others.

Often what has passed for innovation in healthcare is a clever way to maximize the latest reimbursement code or government incentive. For example, a large swath of providers are chasing after Meaningful Use incentives. Meanwhile, there are others building a sustainable competitive advantage in rethinking delivery models from the ground up. Not long ago, CareMore was acquired for $800 Million by WellPoint because they’d developed a creative new delivery model. VCs are taking notice. For example, Dirk Lammerts, MD is a VC with the Burrill Venture Capital Group who has stated he will avoid investing in businesses dependent on Medicare reimbursement. Rather, he wants true disruptive innovation.

Taking place this week is the Health Innovation Summit being put on by RockHealth. I’m moderating a panel on business models for health-related startups – panel members include Linda Avey, Ron Gutman and Jennifer Wong. I will speak to some of the aforementioned business models and the accompanying business models for companies that support those entities. Collectively, we’ll discuss models ranging from monetizing mobile apps to how value can be derived as a byproduct of customer use (e.g., PracticeFusion) to media models and more. What creative business models in healthcare should we be aware of? Please add your comments below.

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NewsGator. Those of us who were using RSS readers in the middle of the past decade most likely think of desktop app FeedDemon for Windows or desktop/mobile app NetNewsWire for Mac when we hear the name.

But the company has spent the last several years turning itself into an enterprise networking company that competes with Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer and the many others out there. And it’s had its biggest year yet in 2011, chief executive JB Holston tells me, by steadily building up its business on top of a place you might not have thought of: Microsoft SharePoint.

It’s riding the popularity of simpler social software for businesses by bringing industry-leading features to Microsoft’s extremely full-featured and extremely arcane collaboration platform, which has 125 million or so seats worldwide. Which is to say, a big pool of clients who don’t naturally gravitate to the freemium model that some competitors have used to get in with small and medium-sized businesses. Instead, all the products cost money. (Also, note that the RSS reader, which are still available for download after all these years on the NewsGator site, are now owned by Nick Bradbury and Black Pixel, respectively.)

The results in 2011? NewsGator added one million new paid seats over the course of the year, on top of its existing two million. Those additions aren’t just from a few clients who went all in, Holston says, but from among the 300 companies using it now. 100 of them were new last year, he adds, including both the “Global 2000″ corporate customers that normally it targets, as well as medium-sized businesses of 5,000 seats or less who decided to buy in.

Having been founded in 2004, and having raised some $39.3 million in venture backing, the company has come a long way to being profitable and growing across its key metrics.

How did the transition happen? Holston says that back in 2006, defense contractor Lockheed Martin had taken its enterprise RSS service, cobbled it together with SharePoint, Google search and some other features to create its own “Facebook for enterprise.” The SharePoint team at Microsoft noticed, and talked to NewsGator about building a fuller-fledged product line.

NewsGator then went on to launch the first versions of its modern software suite at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in 2007, and has been expanding its business since then. Today, the components for its marquee product line, Social Sites for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, include Microblogging, Activity Streams, Communities, Spheres, Social Profiles, Social Insights, as well as desktop and email clients, and integration with Microsofts Lync and Glassboard products.

Beyond these Facebook-style features, the company has taken the typical approach among enterprise vendors, building out additional features for compliance, IT support, local hosting etc. While it provides APIs to import or export data from other products, like Salesforce’s Chatter, SharePoint is where it’s staying focused on, Holston says. ”Our view is that there’s so much that Microsoft is doing to continue to push their enterprise relationships that we can leverage, that we think it’s a rich place to stay.”

When I asked about the long-time plans for the company — say, an acquisition by Microsoft, or an IPO — he said that the plan for now is continuing to grow the company as its core business continues to take advantage of the current market.

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Exclusive - I first learned about hosted business intelligence software startup RJMetrics a few weeks ago, when Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg wrote how he made creative use of their software suite for his latest fundraising round; in fact he said he liked it so much he asked to invest in the company.

Fast forward to today: RJMetrics has landed $1.2 million in seed financing from Goldberg, early-stage VCs including SoftTech VC, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and Zelkova Ventures, and other angel investors such as Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar and DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg.

In addition, Jason Goldberg has joined the Philadelphia startup’s board of directors.

Founded in January 2009 by Robert J. Moore (the ‘R’) and Jake Stein (the ‘J’), RJMetrics was bootstrapped to date and managed to get to profitability by selling subscriptions for its hosted business intelligence software to organizations that operate database-driven websites (mostly e-commerce companies, SaaS vendors, social media organizations and online content providers).

Basically, RJMetrics provides tools for database analysis, enabling its customers to extract data from their business and transform it into a more suitable format for analysis and providing them with the means to turn it into beautiful, actionable charts.

Moore and Stein were both formerly employed by venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, so they knew that they’d be better off waiting as long as possible before raising outside capital, and only agreed to take on investors when they were absolutely sure that it would “generate positive returns”.

For one, they say, almost 100 percent of this seed funding round came from firms or individuals who have used RJMetrics’ product extensively, which is always a big plus.

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ADTRAN this morning announced that it is to acquire Nokia Siemens Networks’ fixed line Broadband Access business, all associated services and network management solutions, intellectual properties, technologies and the established customer base. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The news comes right after Nokia Siemens Networks announced that it would be laying off 17,000 people worldwide before the end of 2013. At the time, the company outlined plans to focus on mobile broadband and services, and that it would be actively divesting, selling or putting in maintenance mode business units that it considers non-core to this new ‘strategy’.

Roughly 400 people will transfer to ADTRAN globally as a result of the transaction, including engineering, R&D and sales staff.

The deal also includes provisions which would allow ADTRAN solutions to be incorporated by Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) into its offerings.

The planned transaction is expected to close by the end of April 2012. ADTRAN says it expects the acquired business to be neutral to diluted earnings per share for the first 12 months and accretive after the first full year.

Also read: DragonWave Buys Part Of Nokia Siemens Networks, Gains 360 Employees

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Zentyal, the Zaragoza, Spain-based maker of the Zentyal Linux small business server, has raised $1 million in Series A funding from freshly financed and Europe-focused venture capital firm Open Ocean Capital.

Zentyal develops a server solution that combines cloud-based services to make network management easy and secure for small and medium-sized businesses. Basically, it’s an open source alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Small Business Server.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

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GramercyOne, a New York City-based provider of cloud-based business management and marketing software, has secured $14.5 million in Series A financing.

The funding round was led by Revolution Ventures (which is chaired by AOL founder Steve Case) with participation from Grotech Ventures, TDF and Jubilee Investments.

Launched in 2010, GramercyOne offers a product called Booker Platform, a swiss army knife of software tools that enable companies to attract and reach out to customers through social commerce, group buying services, mobile and local advertising and social booking solutions.

The company says it currently provides cloud services to over 2,500 companies across the globe (56 countries and counting, with eight languages supported so far).

Its customers range from small-sized service companies like local spas, fitness centers, beauty salons and whatnot to big organizations such as Hilton Worldwide.

GramercyOne claims its Booker Platform is currently used to process over 700,000 transactions – averaging $1 million in value – every day.

Says Revolution Ventures’ president, Tige Savage:

“GramercyOne allows the e-commerce revolution to move from the sale of products to
the sale of services.

The company’s leading applications finally make it as easy to purchase and schedule a service appointment online as it is to purchase a song or a book online.”

Savage will be joining GramercyOne’s board of directors together with Grotech’s Don Rainey; the two also serve on the board of LivingSocial.

Interestingly, GramercyOne was started after its SpaBooker platform was carved out as a business division within SpaFinder, a major spa media and marketing company.

According to the company, the functionality required to enable online scheduling of spa appointments was starting to gain traction outside of the spa industry, and thus the SpaBooker division was spun out in to what is now GramercyOne.

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Exclusive - Roughly 21 months after successfully launching its vendor-neutral online marketplace for SaaS and cloud-based business applications, GetApp.com has secured $1.1 million from Spanish-American investment firm Nauta Capital to invest in further growth.

GetApp.com is essentially a hub for SMB owners to compare, select and purchase SaaS and Web-based applications that can help them manage and grow their business.

GetApp.com says it currently reaches some 60,000 businesses on a monthly basis (located primarily in North America and the UK), helping them discover thousands of cloud-based business apps and find the ones that best match their needs and requirements.

In total, roughly 1,500 vendors – including the likes of Zoho, NetSuite, Mavenlink and Assistly – have started using the fledgling company’s platform for online leads generation.

Available app categories range from CRM to marketing automation solutions, HR and project management tools to accounting and business intelligence applications.

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Have you ever called a local restaurant, store or service professional and been put on hold for more than give minutes? Or worse, you can’t get through to a representative and are left leaving a message on an answering machine with no assurance that you voicemail will be checked. The fact is it can be frustrating to communicate with local and general businesses via the phone. Enter TalkTo, a company launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, which allows consumers to send text messages send messages to any business and get quick responses to questions, feedback, and more.

How does this happen? Well, TalkTo uses SMS to communicate with businesses. Via a web app, consumers can search for any business in the TalkTo directory, enter the address or location (city, zipcode etc.) and TalkTo will make sure that message will be seen by the business. With TalkTo, you can ask questions, give feedback, or make appointments or reservations directly with any business as easily as sending a text or instant message to your friend.

And what makes the platform so appealing is that a business doesn’t necessarily need to engage with TalkTo to receive the message. The company employs a call center that receives the message and will notify the business immediately of the request and will make sure the consumer receives an answer to the question.

Of coure, the aim is to onboard all businesses onto TalkTo’s self-serve platform so that businesses can take control over responding to consumer inquiries. Businesses can forward text messages to their email address (i.e. Google Voice) or a cell phone number.

For example, say you want to see how long the wait is at a restaurant. You simply search for the restaurant via TalkTo’s free iOS app, set a location, and send a text asking how long the wait time is. If the restaurant is online, it will receive the message immediately and can respond. If the establishment isn’t using TalkTo’s platform, a call center representative will call the restaurant, find out the wait time and SMS you immediately with the answer.

Another bonus for consumers is that they can see whether a business is online and using TalkTo’s self-service platform, ensuring that the business will respond immediately. So if you need a plumber for an emergency, you can see if the plumber will be able to contact you ASAP.

Founded by an entrepreneur-in-residence at General Catalyst and a physicist who worked at MIT’s Media Lab, the company plans to make money via advertising to TalkTo users via the app and also has a freemium model for businesses (but the startup says the majority of businesses will use the service for free).

TalkTo has the potential to disrupt the local business market (and national business market) in the same way that bringing chat onto retail sites had disrupting communications in e-commerce. No one wants to wait on the phone, and email can be slow as well. SMS Messaging is a natural form of communication these days and the most efficient for simple questions. It makes sense to bring this communication to businesses.

Q&A
Judges: John Ham (Ustream), Hilary Mason (Bit.ly), Kevin Rose (Milk), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures)

GZ: large companies are likely to have large number if customers. Isn’t it easier to get on the phone?

A: A phone call can be painful and outdated and frustrating.

KR: I love this idea, it is awesome. Reminds me of what uber has done for transportation. The fact that I can text is so lightweight.

HM: This is awesome. Do you have a data source for the restaurants and other listings. Do you give them back analytics.

A: Not yet.

JH: I like the idea because you are getting close to the consumer. What vertical will you focus on? How do you display business metadata to consumer?

A: We are going to start with disrupting the way people interact with businesses.

HM: Do you have anything in place to deal with dispute resolution.

A: Today, we don’t. But we will build out tools for businesses.

CZ: How do businesses receive the information?

A: It’s realtime chat based on Python.

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When it comes to business intelligence and competitive analysis, large businesses hire consultants and employ in-house analysts to help determine where a business should be operating, how to compete, how to grow and more. But what about small businesses? According to the SBA, 99.9% of the businesses in the US are small businesses. There’s a huge underserved market around SMBs and providing the same business intelligence to this sector could help many businesses actually grow. TechCrunch Disrupt startup SizeUp enables business owners to evaluate their competitiveness and make decisions that will help them increase revenue and save money.

SizeUp provides many of the same demographic, industry, geographic, business, and cost data that big businesses use to make smarter decisions, but provides it to all companies at no cost to the end-user. And the company uses a Mint-like data analysis amongst platform users so businesses can see how the stack up against similar companies and competition.

First, SizeUp allows businesses to compare their business, in terms of revenue, employees, growth, salary, profit and more, against the rest of their competition in a region. SizeUp, which says it ‘supercrunches’ millions of data points from both public and private source, enables businesses to perform a side-by-side, apples-to-apples competitiveness comparison of their business to all other competitors in their industry from the local to national level.

Second, SizeUp can show businesses where competitors, customers, and suppliers are located on a map, and creates a geo-visual list of potential buyers and vendors. This gives businesses insight how how to serve existing customers, find new ones and pick suppliers. Plus, businesses can see areas with potential customers but little competition.

Businesses can also use SizeUp to find the best places to advertise. SizeUp will actually show business owners the best areas to target their next advertising campaigns. Users can choose from pre-set reports to find areas with the highest industry revenue, most
underserved markets, and where average business revenue is highest. And businesses can use custom demographic and business filters.

SizeUp is free for now, but will look to monetize money through lead generation, service partnerships, a freemium model, advertising, and licensing.

Data analysis is playing a huge role in large companies day-to-day internal operations, so why should small businesses not be able to access similar services. In the same way that Mint is empowering consumers with financial data, SizeUp is giving business owners a new opportunity to gain competitive insight into how a business can make more money, outperform their competition, and find the best places for success.

Q&A
Judges: John Ham (Ustream), Hilary Mason (Bit.ly), Kevin Rose (Milk), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures)

JH: What business model will you focus on first?

A: As we have had conversations with businesses, we realized that there is a bigger market especially in licensing.

HM: Where does your data come from?

A: We get data from IRS records, annual reports, courthouse filings, agencies and more. We are updating this frequently.

HM: Do you have a mechanism to help businesses who aren’t that savvy about how to identify competitors, etc.?

A: We have a Q&A and how-to to explain how this works for businesses.

KR: How do you figure out what is relevant for a specific business?

A: We need to know what business they are in and where they are located. It’s very local.

GZ: What does the product roadmap look like?

A: We want to target products for small businesses.

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