Gabrielle Boko, former Sage marketing and branding executive, has been hired as global EVP of software marketing for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. That gives her some immediate work as HP Enterprise is the Platinum Sponsor for Envision, the April Microsoft conference that resulted from a complete organ transplant involving the body of the former Convergence conference. Boko was with Sage North America from July 2013 until her departure in October.

Columbus has raised its predicted earnings and revenue for the year ended December 31. The Denmark-based reseller and ISV raised earnings estimate by 11.7 percent to about $15.7 million and revenue expectation by 9 percent to $168.4 million for the recently ended year. "We experienced a great final sprint in 2015 with a high activity level in several of our operational units, especially in the U.S., U.K. and Denmark, where the utilization of resources in the service business was very high," CEO Thomas Honoré said in a prepared statement.

Dynamics revenue for the second quarter ended December 31 rose by 3 percent over the prior year, Microsoft said in its earnings report this week. The company, which does not breakout revenue numbers for the software line, said that was primarily because of the year-over-year doubling of the sale of seats for Dynamics CRM Online The totals were depressed by about 8 percent by the impact of currency changes.