Sage North America is introducing the Sage Advisor Dashboard for Partners at the end of the month. The company says the online tool, available via the Sage Partner Portal, is designed to provide the channel with same kind of customer information that the vendor has. "If they call into tech support on how to use something, it captures that," was one example provided by Donald Deshaies, VP of channel management.

Sweden's Jeeves Information Systems has acquired privately held ERP SolvAxis, which is headquartered in Switzerland. Terms were not disclosed. Although this does not directly impact the United States, it follows on the heels of Jeeves opening a U.S. office and launching JeevesERP Version 4 in the last month. Jeeves is one of those companies with private equity money behind it, in this case Battery Ventures. which cobbled together Consona, which later merged with CDC Software to produce Aptean.

SAP hasn't been modest in its earnings calls in the last couple of years and generally, it's got the numbers to back that up. The company said its cloud run-rate is about $1.5 billion. So this week's first quarter webcast had executives touting SAP as the top cloud company. "We are not only growing cloud faster than our nearest competitor," said co-CEO Bill McDermott, "We help [customers] run their entire businesses in the cloud which our competitors just don't do."

Exact has partnered with WiSys to provide warehouse management capabilities for users of Exact Macola. Beyond the simple announcement, this marks another change for Exact because if it has had alliances with third party vendors in this country, it has been a long time since any have been announced. It also is part of a declared best-of-breed strategy for Exact Macola. WiSys was founded by Macola founder, Bruce Hollinger, and the fact that the company mentioned this in a press release also represents a difference approach to doing things.