I'm not impressed by the advent of near-field communication, the up-and-coming technology for enabling mobile devices to exchange data by passing near each other. Back on the farm in southern Indiana we had near field communication. When dad was on the tractor in the field near the house we'd yell out, "Do you want us to bring you a sandwich?"... Verizon's email security has gotten much tighter.

NetSuite continued its march into the Tier 1 financial software space during the third quarter ended September 30. In this week's webcast, CEO Zach Nelson said the cloud company beat all forecasts, saw high growth across all industry groups and set a record for $1-million plus deals. "Most of them are single tier—full-blown replacement of software that was done 20 years ago," he said. He also ascribed the much of growth to global systems integrators.

Avalara has named Richard Asquith as VP of global tax compliance. The Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based company says Asquith's hiring is part of its plan to develop its transactional tax compliance offerings internationally. Based in the United Kingdom, Asquith founded the TMF Group and led its global VAT practice for 10 years. He began his career at KPMG in the U.K. and later joined Ernst & Young, and assisted companies entering in new markets while working in Russia, Hungary and France.

Whether Microsoft's cloud ERP is real or not, compensation for its named executives was certainly in the cloud for the year ended June 30. The group saw its pay balloon from the value of stock awards granted. At the top, new CEO Satya Nadella had total compensation of $84.3 million, with $79.7 million from the stock grants. Nadella took over the job in February left by founder Steve Ballmer and you'd have to call this a pretty good fiscal 2014 for the new top guy. COO Kevin Turner pulled down $22.7 million, just over $19 million from the stock. General counsel Brad Smith had $19.1 million in compensation; just under $17 million from stock awards.