SAP plans to do business through resellers in the long term and its work to build its U.S. channel to push the SaaS-based Business By Design sound a lot like some other vendors who want fewer, larger VARs.  “We are certainly in an expansion of the channel. We are working with our installed base of VARs to build out mega VARs,” says Kevin Gilroy, the executive leading the SAP effort in the SME space. Read more...

Raj Patel, who has served as CEO of Exact Holding since July 1, 2005, is leaving the company on July 31. Patel will be succeeded on an interim basis by Martijn J.C. Janmaat, who was served on the Exact supervisory board since April 23, 2009. An official statement says Exact will consider Janmaat’s long-term role over the next few months. Read more...

A lot of folks of a certain age think of Bob Vila when it comes to This Old House which is funny since after he left Steve Thomas was the host for 12 years and current host Kevin O’Connor’s first season was 2001.  It’s a bit like the problem Microsoft faces with its Dynamics line and a recent post under the Executive Insight blog by Kara Ellefson on the Dynamics Finance Community site suggests that the original names of Microsoft’s accounting products have survived better than Vila’s name recognition. Read more...

Versata Software says SAP is acting like Microsoft, and that’s not a compliment as it complained to the European Commission that SAP A.G. illegally excluded it from selling to three fourths of the largest companies that use SAP’s enterprise software. Versata alleges SAP changed its interface and then withheld information necessary to let the systems interoperate and cloned Versata’s pricing Software, known as Pricer. The complaint continued that SAP bundled with cloned pricing software with its ERP product and that these actions violate Article 102 of the European Union treaty. Versata, based in Austin, Texas, asked the commission at a minimum to require SAP to provide interoperability information and unbundle its pricing configuration software and impose an appropriate fine. Versata’s filing cited a Microsoft case in which that company paid a fine of 1.6 billion euros and was forced to change its business practices by the commission. Last year, Versata, formerly known as Trilogy, was awarded $139 million by a U.S. District Court jury in Texas which found SAP had infringed on Versata patents when SAP built a clone of Versata’s software. Read more...