This is one of those announcements that I have few thoughts about its importance to anybody. However, Australian vendor Pronto Software says that it has integrated Cognos 10 into its Pronto-Xi out-of-the-box. I'm still waiting for Pronto to follow up on last year’s announcement of a handful of American resellers. Whatever its importance, Pronto says it is the first ERP vendor to embed and optimize IBM’s new Cognos 10 functionality. For what it’s worth, David Jackman, Pronto's managing director says users "will be able to create ad hoc reports, slice and dice the data, and create dashboards in a new intuitive interface."

CPA Peyton Burch, who left the VAR business to work with Taylor Macdonald at Deltek, has joined Macdonald in his effort to enlist accounting firms and VARs in the Intacct channel program. Burch joined the vendor of Internet-based financial applications this week as senior channel executive during its Advantage customer and channel conference.  "I am going to be working with Taylor on the channel team and CPA program," says Burch, who is based in Houston. "The idea is to onboard them and ramp them up" so that they can started generating money from their involvement with Intacct.

Terry Petrzelka, who founded international Dynamics reseller Tectura, is retiring from the company he founded in 2001. Petrzelka will remain with the company during the next three months with his day-to-day responsibilities being assumed by Duane Bell, the COO, who becomes CEO and president. The announcement included a statement from Jerry Poch, managing director of FirstMark Capital, which was described in a prepared statement as the Company's largest investor. Poch becomes the chairman of the company's board of directors. Despite the kind words, having an investor take over the board chairmanship has the suggestion that the money people aren't completely happy with what has happened to their money. However, Petrzelka says he's wanted to do this for three years and the economy hadn't made that possible, so there's a message of optimism in his statement, I think. It's clear Tectura would like to have gone public a few years ago, but market conditions interfered.

Having modules that can fit into its different accounting software lines has been something Sage has talked about a long time. That plan is now gaining speed with the rollout of Common Payroll, an Accpac module that will be released this month for Abra SQL, MAS 500 and X3 and in November for MAS 200 SQL.