Just as the competition between Microsoft and SAP appears likely to start heating up, Microsoft has extended its connections between its Dynamics AX and SAP Business Suite. The company says a new connector accelerates two-tier ERP deployments between the two, enabling IT organizations to use Dynamics AX in subsidiaries, divisions or branches and to easily connect with SAP installations at HQ locations. Read more...

SilverEdge Systems Software of Schaumburg, Ill. has received the Deltek Partner Award for its implementation of Deltek Vision at American StructurePoint. The VSE Corp. won the Business Impact award, which Deltek said it got for use of Deltek’s government contracting applications that won in VSE winning millions of dollars in government contracts. The Innovation Award went to architecture and engineering design firm, Ballinger, for its innovative use of Deltek Vision’s capabilities to build custom project information center dashboards. The Implementation Award went to QinetiQ North America for its implementation of Costpoint across thousands of users in multiple customers. Read more...

Sage North America is studying whether to bring X3 Standard, a less-sophisticated version of its high-end manufacturing package into the United States. During the Insights reseller conference, that product's name got translated by the gossip mill into "X2", which serves as a handy way to think about the product, although not an officially accurate term. The version of X3 that has been introduced here is the X3 Premium, according to Himanshu Palsule, VP of product strategy and marketing for Sage Business Solutions. Read more...

This is not about editors at a trade show buffet, which is something like an attack by locusts. It's about the Macintosh computer and its spread among press and analysts and even some resellers. The trend is hardly major at this point. Yet, Macs have been showing up in greater numbers, at least that's what I think I saw at Microsoft Convergence and Sage Insights. It doesn't take much to represent greater numbers because there were hardly any before. Read more...