While the merits of carrying multiple lines have always been debated – offering customers a choice versus concentrating resources on one line – it should be easier to handle multiple cloud lines. The vendors argue that Internet-based products eliminate the need for end users to staff up to handle all the technology plumbing. Shouldn’t this work the same way  for VARs? If there’s less plumbing to worry about, doesn’t this enable the resellers to spend less on the technology end and redeploy resources (a crappy phrase for firing some people to hire others) into sales and business consulting? To an extent, the CPA firms getting into this market have an advantage on the consulting end. But where both VARs and CPA will need to ramp up is business analytics and intelligence. Simply, most businesses have accounting software. What they don’t have is ability to make sense of it all and we are probably poised for a surge in the analytics business. Certainly, SAP, which owns Business Objects, sees BI as a big part of the future, which it trumpeted when it introduced the “next generation” of in-memory BI products earlier this month. The fact that Deltek and Cyma both introduced new analytical products this month and AccuFund is developing a dashboard for its accounting application could just be coincidental. But I don't think so.