Nonprofit vendor Serenic hasn't had a lot of good financial news to report in the last two years. While the third quarter ended November 30 brought good news on the top line, with revenue up 30 percent over last year's corresponding period, the company's loss for the most recently ended period doubled. The third-quarter loss of $384,153 compared to $191,186 in red ink a year earlier.

At his last financial earnings webcast for a fiscal year, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe took the opportunity to lay it on the competition as did Bill McDermott, who will be the last CEO standing after May. Well, that's lay it on in SAP terms which is a lot milder than the stuff dished out by NetSuite. "In the fourth quarter alone, we grew six times as fast as our nearest competitor," Hagemann-Snabe said. The closest competition is usually named Oracle. McDermott also took a swipe at unnamed rivals with "Who would buy solutions from a vendor who is not profitable?"

Exact says the number of applications available for Exact Online in the Exact App Center tripled in 2014. The Dutch company said that kind of development for Exact Online had not occurred previously. Hmm, since the cloud-based product was not available outside of the Netherlands for a long time and was introduced in the United States only late in 2013, that's hardly surprising. There are now 40 software companies represented in the year-old App Center with products there sorted by industry, solution area and product.

Microsoft is going on an eight-city tour between January 29 and March 3 on what it terms the Now & Next Tour. The jaunt is designed to show the 60 new features in the combined Service Pack 1 and 2 releases of Dynamics GP, along with the new Business Analyzer App. That's the Now part. The Next segment involves discussion of "the current and future direction of Microsoft Dynamics GP." (Is Microsoft suggesting there might be a change?).