Hitachi Solutions America has acquired Ignify in the next step in the consolidation of the Dynamics AX market. With $24 million in revenue, Ignify was No. 22 on Bob Scott's Top 100 VARs for 2015. Ignify was founded in 1999 by Sandeep Walia and Pankaj Kumar and sells Dynamics AX, CRM and AX for Retail Point of Sale. Hitachi Solutions does not break out numbers and that means Ignify gets subsumed into the larger company and that's the last we'll have on any details there.

Before new management came to town, there was no new version of Macola released in 10 years. Now, Exact has gone from introducing Version 10 last year to Exact Macola 10.3 this month. Features include integration with Avalara's sales tax software, AvaTax. Exact has added Windows 10 support and Spanish language support throughout the product. The company says this bolsters its recent focus and expansion within Latin America.

Infor says more than 50 percent of deals in its pipeline are for SaaS products. And because it has been winning a higher percentage of SaaS deals than it does with on-premise, it expects its win rate to rise, CEO Charles Phillips said in the company's recent earnings webcast. In discussing results for the first quarter ended October 31, "Our pipeline is up double digits," Phillips said. SaaS revenue could top 50 percent of the total next year if the trend continues.

The contract of Blackbaud CEO Mike Gianoni has been extended for four years and he has been granted some plump rewards. Gianoni's salary was raised to $700,000 annually, up from a $600,000 based and he was granted a restricted stock grant of the Company's common stock valued at $5 million, which vests on Dec. 31, 2019 if he is still employed. The announcement by the nonprofit software publisher credited Gianoni with "a rapid wave of innovation within its product portfolio, significantly improved client satisfaction, and has experienced more than 60-percent growth in its stock price."