A flurry of bad press about Intuit's TurboTax applications has ended up as sound and fury and you know the rest. Intuit rolled on with its online applications for the second quarter ended January 31 with results headed up. "Our financial results are strong. The growth of QuickBooks Online subscribers is continuing to accelerate," CEO Brad Smith said during this week's earnings webcast.

Sage One Accounting has been introduced in several markets in sub Saharan Africa. The cloud-based package is being made available through a deal between Sage Pastel Accounting and MTN Business. I bring this up because we don't hear a lot about Sage One in the United States and this is a worldwide product. Given the dominance of Intuit in this market and the fact Xero is the fast-growing second banana, it will probably take a different approach for the low-cost Sage product to have much impact here.

Armanino has been named Adaptive Insights' Partner of the Year for 2014. The San Ramon, Calif.-based accounting firm only picked up the line in April so that's a pretty good record. My impression is that, especially on the technology consulting side, whatever Armanino decides to do it ramps up quickly and does extremely well. Palo Alto Calif.-based Adaptive also named Intuitive Tek as Partner of the Region for North America.