After sparring with investment firm T. Rowe Price for a couple of months, Oracle has won its bid to take over NetSuite. After extending its tender offer third time, Oracle said the November 4 deadline would be the last. The parties said this week that the bidder, which needed a majority of unaffiliated shares, had 53.21 percent of that class of shares tendered.

Crowe Horwath has introduced a suite of Dynamics AX apps. The suite comes when Microsoft is pushing Dynamics 365, the cloud version of AX without a clear migration path for the installed base. That lack of migration path has stirred a lot of conversation among users and slowed down buying cloud decisions, according to resellers.

Acquisitions in 2015 and 2016 and improved operations in Norway were major factors in results for reseller and software developer Columbus for the nine months ended September 30. In this week's earnings webcast, CEO Thomas Honoré cited American purchases, including reseller Interdyn BMI last year, as boosting software sales and services income.

My nightmare is that the current presidential election is going to be like the movie, "Groundhog Day". When we reach Election Day, we are going to wake up six months earlier and go through all this again. By the way, in some states boards of election are offering a choice of Dramamine or screwdrivers to those who have just cast their votes.