While Infor posted a slim bottom line and very slight revenue growth for the third quarter ended February, the company was pleased with results. "One of our challenges is getting noticed and getting invited to deals and that is starting to happen," CEO Charles Phillips said in this week's earnings conference call. He pointed to the impact of the company's ad campaign and noted the number of attendees it had attracted to an analysts' dinner.

Xero, which has moved into the world market from New Zealand, is going to get a competitor for the low-end accounting market. Reckon, which for years was the QuickBooks distributor in Australia, has launched its owned online accounting application, Reckon One. And the company says the cloud package for small businesses " will be available in New Zealand soon." Reckon One is available for free trial and it is positioned as enabling business users to choose and pay for only the parts of the program they need to use."

Dynamics AX reseller mcaConnect of Greenwood Village, Colo., has acquired CRM specialist SalesMetrix of Houston. And there seems to be a trend here since this follows after the announcement earlier this month that Hitachi Consulting, also an AX VAR, had bought CRM firm Customer Effective. Will Moseley, SalesMetrix's president, will become mcaConnect's SVP of sales and marketing, with the entire employee and leadership team moving to the new corporate home.

It's been years since I've attended Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference. And after looking at the course agenda, the company has not come up with reasons to lure me back when the conference is held in Washington D.C. in mid-July There are 58 courses listed online So there's a partner day for the Dynamics crew. But as one top VAR said it's "So thin I am not attending! Don't hold your breath for content on partner day!"