Avalara has acquired EZtax, which makes tax compliance products for the telecommunications industry. The company's software, also called EZtax, calculates and files taxes due on such services in the United States and Canada. Terms were not disclosed. The move was the latest by Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based Avalara to purchase companies that make specialized indirect tax applications. In March, the sales and use tax vendor bought Hotspot, which made tax applications for the vacation rental industry. EZtax was founded by CEO Tim Lopatofsky.

Acumatica has named Kathy Visser-May as chief marketing officer; and Nigel LeGresley as chief operating officer. Stijn Hendrikse was the cloud software company's first CMO and served from March 2012 until he left for a sister company in May 2014. A Microsoft veteran, like many Acumatica leaders, Visser-May was senior director for the IT Pro Audience and Platform Evangelism Team from July 2012.

Sage CEO Steve Kelly has been keeping up a blog on his company's site. And that's something that is hard for executives to do with regularity. But it's not available on the North American site. In April, Sage named Antoine Henry as global VP of product marketing, announcing it only in French. Sage talks of ending its country-by-country operation. PR has not been touched. And there often does not seem to be an effort to create publicity for the company and its products. Asked about the X3 sales conference recently in Istanbul, a Turkey,a PR person replied there was no news. There's no "but we can arrange an interview, now, at Summit," about those topics.