Avalara is continuing its signing of a broad array of vendors to utilize its sales tax engine. In the latest crop are Hotcakes Commerce and Jobscope, which markets ERP software for engineer-to-order businesses. Both have become Avalara Solution providers whose users can use AvaTax within their application; Hotcake users for calculating sales tax on each quote and the same for Jobscope on each invoice.

There's a lot of speculation about Microsoft's recent agreement to connect Salesforce.com's CRM application to Microsoft Office and Windows. The result is to be Salesforce for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1 with a preview planned for the fall and general availability next year. The other offspring of this deal is to be Salesforce for Office 365. There are also plans for a new Salesforce App for Outlook. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the deal as helping "customers thrive in a mobile and cloud-first world."

Infor has hired Matt Breslin to lead sales of Infor's Platform Technologies and Lisa Pope to lead sales of the company's CloudSuite. Both were hired as SVPs reporting to president Stephen Scholl. Previously VP of platform and analytics for SAP, Breslin is responsible for sales of the technology stack, including Infor's ION middleware, Ming.le social collaboration platform and Analytics. Pope was previously SVP at QAD and besides leading efforts in cloud and SaaS products she is also responsible for the Upgrade X program.

Deltek has acquired Axium, a company that markets accounting and project management application to architecture and engineering firms. The segment is already a key market for Deltek and the Herndon, Va.-based company said that Axium has more than 2,200 A&E customers in North American with most of these having fewer than 250 employees each. Terms were not announced. Clark Haley, CEO of BCS/ProSoft, a Deltek reseller, applauded the deal.