The man who would have been king says farewell to the man who was. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was supposed to succeed Doug Burgum as the head of Microsoft Business Solutions in August 2007. Instead, Microsoft decided Nadella had too much talent for that small operation and made Kirill Tatarinov head of the Dynamics organization, a job he has held since. Nominally existing as MBS, Dynamics itself comes to an end as a separate operation as its functions have been parceled out. However, Nadella described the Dynamics group as having grown to a more than $2-billion business.

Sage is moving its North American headquarters from Irvine, Calif., to Atlanta, Ga. The change coincides with the announcement this month of a series of Customer Business Centers being established. Irvine, I believe, was a legacy of the former State of the Art, which was purchased by Sage in 1998. Part of its sounds like the company putting all its chips on the rather fuzzy Sage Life.

Unit4 is collaborating with Microsoft to bring to market what it terms self-driving ERP. Developers from the companies will utilize technology from Azure's 's PaaS platform components and Microsoft Office capabilities such as predictive analytics, machine learning, event stream analysis and complex event processing. "Like a self-driving car, self-driving ERP takes care of the tasks that are better served by technology" Unit4 CEO Jose Duarte said in a prepared statement this week.