The recent appointment of Michael Schmitt as the new head of the SAP Business ByDesign operation appears to be one of a series of steps in putting some life into the low end of the publisher's product line. SAP has invited the press to a conference call on October 17 in which "We will outline our strategy and talk about our go-to-market model and road map for SAP Business ByDesign in the near future and beyond." The big gun on the call is Rainer Zinow, SVP, SAP Cloud from the mothership SAP SE (once known as SAP AG).

When Open Systems says it has opened an office, that generally means it has acquired a reseller. In this case, the Minneapolis, Minn.-based software vendor has purchased Adaptive Business Solutions, based in Indianapolis, Ind. ABS has become Open Systems' Indiana Regional office. ABS was founded by president Brett Striegel in 1997. For the software company, this is the second purchase of a VAR this year.

Two companies have recently reported statistics on how low cloud accounting penetration is among businesses. At his company's partner summit in August, Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill put the total at 7 percent for the midmarket and Intuit SVP Dan Wernikoff estimated the percentage for cloud financial products at small businesses as under 4 percent. In a more recent interview, Roskill said Gartner expects the midmarket share to hit 47 percent in five years; but that's still a ways from being the majority platform.

Intacct has hired Kevin Cumley as the new director of the Intacct Accountants Program. Cumley, who was most recent VP of strategic alliances at nonprofit vendor Abila, was previously president of Forepoint, a Sage and Deltek reseller. He reports of Taylor Macdonald, VP of channels. Cumley got to Abila after serving as a VP at Avectra starting in 2012.