Taylor Macdonald, the former Sage channel champion, gets a new opportunity to build a channel in his new position with SaaS vendor, Intacct, following his short stints at Deltek, Promethean and Infor. For Macdonald, it's the first chance to do this with a completely Internet-based company and this will be a test of just how ready traditional VARs are for cloud-based computing (a term I still hate).

Having gone into the work-at-home, work-on-vacation, work in Europe life style, the thought has often hit me that there are no work days. There are tasks and it becomes simply a matter of when they need to be done. When they are finished it's back to things other than work. There are adjustments to be made, such as dealing with a French keyboard in which the "q" is placed where "a" is on an English keyboard, numbers that are all available via a shift key and the Web essential colon and backslash on the same key in the lower row.

Fujitsu has entered an alliance with sales-and-use tax vendor SpeedTax to reach accounting firms. And while potential relationships with resellers have yet to be detailed, it seems probable they will be. In the meantime, Kimberly Hogan, who heads the company's initiative, said Fujitsu intends to enter relationships with organizations in areas that include bill management and payment workflow, tax preparation, supply chain management, and stock options management.

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The Sage Group is back in the merger-and-acquisition business, but the efforts of the English parent of Sage North America to take over a Polish company did not succeed. Sage bid 12.75 pounds a share for Teta, an ERP and HR vendor based in Wroclaw, Poland. However, Unit4, whose products include Coda and Agresso and which had previously placed a bid, came back with an offer of 12.80 pounds per share. Sage dropped its effort saying it could not justify a higher price. However, the move demonstrates that Sage, which purchased nothing of significance in 2009, sees the market differently this year.