Until this week, the question seemed to be who would run out of runway first, Sage or Intacct. Sage needed to fill a gap between Sage Live and X-3; Intacct, a lot more revenue. Sage CEO Stephen Kelly said during this week's third-quarter trading update the parties had been talking for a year, reporting Sage convinced Intacct not to go public.

Directions, which has been the Dynamics NAV conference for years, is striving to be the Dynamics SMB channel show. The new goal comes as Microsoft has clearly recognized that the Dynamics partners generally don't fit Inspire (formerly the Worldwide Partner Conference.

Aptos, once Epicor Software's retail application arm, has reached an agreement to acquire TXT Retail. Based in Milan, Italy, TXT retail provides end-to-end applications for the apparel, luxury, specialty and general retail sectors. Terms were not disclosed.

The Sage Group has agreed to buy cloud vendor Intacct for $850 million in cash. I suppose 9.6 times trailing 12-month revenue is a decent price. And this seems to be what Sage CEO Stephen Kelly was suggesting at the company's Summit conference in May when he said Sage would fill in the gap between X3 and Sage Live by acquisition.