Following last week’s item that McGladrey has signed with Vertex SMB comes the news the sales-tax vendor has signed Cargas Systems. Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to those folks. These two VAR deals are two more than we have seen from Vertex which is pushing its TaxCentral for small and medium-size companies with the tag line “The Most Trusted Name in Tax Now Available in Your Size” on its home page.

Serenic will exit its historical software businesses. The company this week said, as it reported results for the year ended February 28, that  it will sell shares in Serenic Canada, Serenic Software and Serenic Software (EMEA) to Sylogist. That means the Serenic Navigator line of nonprofit software based on Dynamics NAV will be marketed by Sylogist. The purchase price is $11.9 million minus the assumption by Sylogist of $3.9 million in Serenic liabilities with about $8 million in proceeds to Serenic. All figures are in Canadian dollars. About $7.5 million will be distributed to Serenic shareholders.

Syspro has named an IBM manager as president of Syspro Canada. The Johannesburg, South Africa-based company named James Moffatt to replace John Fahey, who had been with the company for 18 years, just under 12 of them in the Canadian presidency. Moffatt, who started on June 16, was IBM’s director of sales, business analytics from January 2012 until he took the new position. before that he was director of sales for Cognos FSR at IBM from August 2010 through January 2012. The announcement also strikes me as noteworthy because Syspro doesn't have that many personnel changes that make it to press release form and I'm thinking the people I know in Syspro U.S. have been around a long time so there's generally not many executive hires to announcement.

Bill Kizer, who had served several Sage resellers as a sales manager, died this week after an 18-month battle of liver cancer. Kizer was probably better known as the founder of the LinkedIn group Sage Partners, Employees & Alumni Networking Group, which he started in May 2008 and which grew to more 8,500 members currently. Born in 1951, his active role in social media showed when his profile reached the 1 percent most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012.