Salesorder.com has an API connector available for eCommerce integration, although it’s still a beta product according to the headline with the announcement. The official description is that “This connector comes with pre-built connectors and also a custom connector where you (or we) can develop your own integration to a cart of your choice.” Salesorder.com is owned by Ray Tetlow, who also owns Skyytek, once NetSuite’s top VAR and now ramping up on sales of Business By Design. Read more...

This week’s conference of the National Retail Federation served as the platform for vendors to announce a variety of retail applications.  This included Dynamics AX for Retail 2.0, the Microsoft product that benefits from a heavy dose of two European reseller applications that it purchased in 2009. The application offers Retail Role Centers, expanded scenarios and centralized management for loyalty programs, new interfaces for assortment and item management and new localizations and translations for use in more countries. Read more...

Avalara has received SAP certification for the integration of its sales and use tax product with SAP’s offering with AvaTax for SAP Business One. I always see the press releases about these announcements as marking time because if you know what AvaTax does, then the B1 integration does all the same things with that product that Avalara works with.

The inverse of the statement that the big do very well is that the small do really badly. And while the market may not be rigidly delineated along those lines, it’s clear that small VARs are looking for safety. However, it’s probably more accurate to say, the mid-size do well, because there’s some talk that the giant VARs aren’t as strong. But in the in-between category is a company like Atlanta-based Ibis, whose owner, Andy Vabulas, reported that it had a 30 percent increase in revenue for 2010, around $17 million. Two factors stood out: the addition of Dynamics AX, whose higher price points are going to raise revenue if you can sell, to the previous lineup of Dynamics GP and CRM. The other was “basic blocking and tackling.”