Stijn Hendrikse, who has held global positions with Microsoft, is joining online application vendor Acumatica in April. Hendrikse, who has been with Microsoft for 12 years, has been senior marketing director for a year and has had worldwide marketing responsibility for the Small & Medium Business segment. He has had some other heavy weight jobs at Microsoft including director of MS Office, director of competitive strategy, director of public sector and chief of staff.

The number of European Dynamics reseller news items this week has to do with my belief that we are going to see more European organizations move into this country. However, it is not clear that to all that there is a trend. Did the purchase of First Tech Direct by Columbus mean one is underway? A channel source familiar with European operations said he did not understand this move. But with things tough in Europe because of the debt crisis, it has to be tempting to look for revenue generators in this country where business is better.

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2012 to manufacturing, but as is usual, the product is already in use in a lot of places. The software giant also said it would release an additional limited preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure before mid-year. When I saw the word “Hadoop”, I said, “Bless you” and then ran off to Wikipedia to catch up on my geek-ese. A limited preview of the Hadoop-based service was released in December. There is a bunch of data warehousing stuff coming out with the general availability of SQL Server 2010 on April 1. Call for details.