Edgewater Technology has purchased Zero2Ten, a Dynamics CRM VAR based in Alpharetta, Ga. Edgewater paid $5 million in cash up in an asset purchase to the company and its owners in a deal that included Zero2Ten EMEA, based in Manchester, England. Under an earn-out agreement over next two years, the maximum to be paid is about $8.6 million. For anyone attending Convergence this week, it was obvious CRM is the place to be to hold favor with Microsoft and the bigger, the better.

There was one great measure of the movement of Convergence away from being a Dynamics-centric show to one that's not. It was the keynote by Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft Business Solutions. His speech had strong references to Dynamics CRM. But he discussed none of the four financial packages by name and during presentations involving three award-winning Microsoft customers, there was no mention of what back-end software was being used. One customer was cited for its use of CRM and the others for Azure.

Tribridge has been named 2014 Global BI360 Partner of the Year by Los Angeles, Calif.-based Solver. This is the second straight year that Tribridge, a Tampa, Fla.,-based Dynamics reseller, has received the honor from the business intelligence software company. The awards announced last month also include two separate listings on the press release that give the names of three VARs as best new partner of the year: the SBS Group [I suspect this should have been U.S. Best Partner] was named U.S. Best New Partner.