Sage reseller SWK Technologies took home the award for the largest Acumatica Deployment of the Year at the cloud vendor’s Partner Summit this week. New to the Acumatica fold in the last year, SWK leaders, including CEO Jeff Roth, got to be part of the first official announcement at the Acumatica keynote. Many major awards were handed out during the morning, something that does not happen at a lot of mid-market publishers’ conferences. Alan Hardy, who joined SWK when it purchased his ESC Software earlier this year, received the Sales Execution Award for Executing Most Effective Sales Engagement.

The fact that Kashoo will now be privately labeled by franchisor Liberty Tax by itself is not important. The fact that this is the second such deal for the low-cost cloud software vendor–its first was Paychex in October—is very important. The most recent agreement was announced this week by Liberty CEO John Hewitt during the earnings webcast for his company's first quarter ended July 31. “We are testing an accounting package  that our franchisees can used to provide small business bookkeeping services,” Hewitt said.

Sage tried to load the show floor with attendees at Summit in Las Vegas in July by piling big-name speakers on the keynote stage. Someone who has priced speakers says Magic Johnson’s fee is $60,000 “and you have to buy fuel for his jet.” Add in Karl Rove and Jessica Alba and lesser-known figures, Robert Gibbs and Biz Stone and the bill for bringing in some national press and the rest of the cost of conferences in Vegas and you get some big bucks.

The Randy and Andy parties are must-attend events at Microsoft’ Worldwide Partner Conference and Convergence. But now, formerly loyal Collins Computing, by Steve Collins -but whose most visible representative is president Randy Forkner. the Randy of the party name - has become an Acumatica VAR. The company, whose ERP line was previously limited to Dynamics AX and GP, has been selling Acumatica under the radar and has already become a Gold-level reseller for the cloud company. This will get some people’s attention.