It was a good week for Shopify, which provides ecommerce sites for online business and POS apps for on-premise sales. Both Intuit, which also reported integration with Bigcommerce, and Xero announced integration with the capabilities of Canada-based cloud company. Obviously, Shopify provides the same functionality in enabling sales and associated data to be available to Xero and QuickBooks Online. Xero said the integration is expected to go live this year.

Microsoft Master VAR Socius has become a NetSuite reseller. This is a big win for the San Mateo, Calif.-based cloud software vendor. Over the years, Socius several times was the only reseller to be chosen for both the Dynamics Inner Circle and Sage President's Circle. It sounds like this is also a teaser as NetSuite moves toward its SuiteWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., in early May.

VertexSMB has introduced a returns-only product for its cloud-based sales tax application. The new product enables businesses to import tax data from any financial system to generate returns. The company says accounting firms can use the system to prepare clients' sales and use tax filings. After setting up a VertexSMB account, users can export tax data into an adjustment file and upload it into the cloud application, which will automatically populate date forms and produce signature-ready PDF returns.

Sage has joined the Open Invention Network, a group that promotes and defends Linux. I didn't remember the words "Sage" and "Linux" appearing together before and did a search for the word on the company's website and the only result was the press release announcing this agreement. Sage had a prior agreement to be able to embed MySQL into its products.