Diana Waterman, a long-time Sage channel manager, has joined Avalara. Waterman was director of partner program for Sage Accountant Solutions from April 2013 through April 2015. In that role, she managed the educational program for Sage's accountant program and the Sage 50 reseller channel. Before to that, she was director of partner programs from October 2004 through May 2013 and was responsible for North American channel marketing.

Sage North America has integrated Sage 50 Accounting-Canadian Edition, the former Simply Accounting, with the cloud-based Sage One. The link enables customers to transfer files from Sage One to Sage 50 and, according to the press release, "facilitates the data synchronization of customers, vendors, products and services between the two software solutions and simplifies the setup of Sage One for customers with existing Sage 50 data." The other shoe to be dropped is obviously the former Peachtree now sold as the other application on this continent under the Sage 50 banner.

DSD Business Solutions has announced it is now selling the Acumatica line. This is not quite a secret as the San Diego, Calif.-based reseller listed Acumatica, headed by president Doug Deane, as one of its product lines in its submission for Bob Scott's Top 100 VARs for 2015 (It made No. 55 with $8.41 million in revenue), which was published in early June. And while in July, Sage named a new Business Partner Advisory Council, it has work to do if it wants to bring significant resellers back into the Sage-only camp.

Sage has named members to the reconstituted Business Partner Advisory Council. This is relatively old news, but I think important to deliver. A sore point with departed executives, North American CEO Pascal Houillon and SVP Joe Langner, was their perceived hostility to the channel and that included having disbanded the prior council. I should say that the failure of the company to put out press releases on this subject shows however much enthusiasm the leadership has about the channel, there was not enough to put out a press release about this. In any event, the council members are generally well-known members of the reselling community.