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.

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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.

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Since I don’t hear the screams of the wounded and dying in the Dynamics VAR community, I have been wondering about the status of the Microsoft partner program that was to go into effect this month.  I thought perhaps enough loopholes were set up to let small dealers find shelter under larger resellers that it may not have made a huge difference in trimming the channel. Read more...

At first, I was prepared to call the two-hour outage of some of Intuit's credit-card processing services this week minor. But with several vendors introducing payment systems this month, the question becomes, "What is acceptable downtime when it comes to credit cards?" Read more...