Happy holidays. There will be no newsletter from Bob Scott's Insights on Friday, December 26. Emailing will resume on Friday, Jan. 2, 2015. But news will continue to be posted to the website during this period. As always, we wish the best from Bob Scott's Insights; our sister publication, the Progressive Accountant; and our company, the Progressive Media Group.

Scientists say that the possibility of detecting life on Mars has increased after the discovery on methane in the atmosphere. Wouldn’t you know it? We’ve awaiting the awe of finding life elsewhere and now it’s probably because of extra terrestrial organisms passing gas. The movie, "The Interview" has been pulled because of hacking threats from North Korea. Boy, when these people give a movie two thumbs down, they are serious.

The Epicor Software story for the year ended September 30 for its ERP business was the story across the software industry. Subscription-based revenue rose by double digits as sales of cloud-based products increased. And during this week's earnings webcast, CEO Joseph Cowan referred to what he called the company's "cloud-first business model" for software. Meanwhile, the company continued chopping its losses, which stem from the interest on the debt incurred when the company was purchased and the old Epicor and Activant were merged under the Epicor name.

Blackbaud revealed plans for its NXT line of software months ago. But the company has recently turned up the volume for the iteration of its fundraising and financial software packages fall into that category. Its home page recently began to display a dominant graphic proclaiming "The NXT Generation is Coming", accompanied by the tagline "Intuitive Cloud Accounting", along with links to some short, semi-animated videos and screen shots.