Epicor rode to the end of 2010 on the back of Epicor 9, which has revitalized the company’s financial software revenue and made it much more channel friendly. But CEO George Klaus this week acknowledged what the numbers show, that the revenue growth hasn’t translated to the bottom line. “It’s not the profitability we would like,” he said during the earnings Webcast. Read more...

Activant, which markets specialized financial software, reported that net income for the first quarter ended December 31 dropped to $3.5 million, down 22.4 percent from $4.5 million from last year’s corresponding period. Revenue for the most recently ended quarter was $89.8 million an increase of 1.9 percent from $88.1 million a year ago. Read more...

An increased emphasis on selling premium support contracts is going to be one of the major initiatives undertaken under new chief executive Guy Berruyer. That was one of the points made this week as Sage Group executives spoke to analysts in a day-long conference in London. Increasing support revenue remains important for on-premise products, but will also be an important revenue generator in the SaaS world.

The VAR signup war is on in the cloud. Acumatica, Intacct and NetSuite all issued press releases this week about their newly recruited VARs.  We’ll pass on the box shore for the moment, who has signed up the most, the biggest or best. The fact that the pace of announcements is picking up so rapidly, with both NetSuite and Intacct making inroads at accounting firms, showing the scope of the change. And that can mean only one thing – companies are looking at and buying Internet-based financial applications at a pace we haven’t seen before. Read more...