A reseller at Microsoft Convergence this week exited the exhibit hall to discover three escalators heading down when he needed to go up. "How do I go up?" he asked a security person. "I don't know," was the reply. Perhaps there is a lesson there. Some very complicated things worked well at the eighteenth annual Convergence (buses, meals, onsite and remote registration). However, success came at the expense of small things, evidence of a show on the edge of being unmanageable.

Microsoft has not used this phrase. But a number of the features coming with this year’s release of Dynamics AX running on the Azure platform (Dynamics AX 2012 R3) have the look of offerings from a Managed Service Provider. Microsoft is offering disaster recovery and automatic updates. The updates, according to Pepijn Richter, director of ERP product marketing, resemble the automatic updates from Office installations [Note: HP tech support told me to disable auto Windows updates because they screw up computers. They certainly did with mine].

Exact has introduced a new Premium Support program for Macola users. The introduction comes at a time when Exact is working to turn around the weak operations for its three American manufacturing packages. Premium Support comes in Silver and Gold levels which Exact says are differentiated by frequency of formal assessments, after-hours support availability and timeliness of problem resolution.

It only took only day this week for new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to confirm what the technology press was saying – that former Skype CEO Tony Bates and former Great Plains executive Tami Reller, are leaving the company. People asked me this week why Reller is leaving and unless one of the parties decides to spell it out, we may never know. Bates' departure seems obvious. Reuters coverage said he was passed over for the CEO job. In a letter to Microsoft employees on March 1, Nadella wrote, "Tony Bates has decided this is the right time for him to look for his next opportunity."