Sage North America reported its revenue for the year ended September 30 fell by 10 percent from 2008 results. And that's not great news, but given a not great year, it wasn't out of line with other vendors.

For some in the reseller community, their introduction to Infor was this year’s acquisition of SoftBrands, which had a run rate of about $100 million. By Infor standards, that's a pretty small deal these days for a company with revenue estimated in the $2.5 billion to $2.8 billion range.

A lot of vendors are talking about payment processing services. Sage wants to fulfill the promise of the business it got into when it acquired Verus. Intuit wants to give its payment processing services better penetration of its accounting installed base.

And Microsoft is expanding the Payment Services, the Internet-based payment processing connection for its Dynamics ERP. At first, I wanted to talk of this as a battleground. But it may just be that payment processing becomes a part of the core product. Very soon, not offering payment processing as part of an accounting line will be little different than not offering an accounts receivable module. At its Summit user conference, one reason for the urgency was spelled out by Sue Swenson, CEO of Sage North America, which is that payment processing customers "tend to stay with us longer."  The often-abused word "sticky" comes to mind. I'm not a software developer, obviously, but part of me has always thought that the data captured at a point of sale is the same used for payment processing and for accounting. The numbers just get put into different buckets. However, for this year, payment processing is not the revenue producer vendors had hoped because of the drop in credit-card spending. Sage said its Payments Division reported a 15 percent increase in merchants served, but lower volume per merchant dropped revenue by 4 percent. Intuit had similar results with CEO Brad Smith reporting that the company gained merchants, but lost volume. Smith said the credit card business is poised for strong growth once the economy rebounds.

Microsoft put the color Azure into the Dynamics world and is using the new platform to support its rollout of more offerings under its software plus services program. The company says 150 resellers already market payment services via Dynamics NAV, a number that has more than doubled in the last year, according to Crispin Read, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics ERP.