Three American businesses were chosen as finalists for Microsoft's award for Enterprise Resource Planning. But the winner was Surry, England-based HSO Group, which markets Dynamics AX and CRM. The companies were part of a laundry list of winners and finalists as Microsoft this week released Partner of the Year honorees in the run up to the 2014 Worldwide Partner Conference. HSO operates in retail, manufacturing, distribution and services and says it has more than 350 professionals worldwide.

QAD, which makes manufacturing software, is in the same boat as everyone else. Or should we say on the same cloud as a 53-percent increase in subscription revenue from cloud software sales helped the company to an 11-percent revenue increase for the first quarter ended April 30. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company also sliced its loss to $76,000, compared to a year-earlier loss of $1.3 million and posted operating income of $298,000 in the most recently ended period, as opposed to an operating loss of $1.7 million a year ago.

There's always an opportunity for speculation when a company makes an announcement of an entry into a new market, and then nothing seems to happen. So it is with Australian vendor Gemaccounts, which announced its entry into the America market in August, hired industry veteran Ken Del Gobbo as president in October and issued its last press release do date in December. More peculiar is that its last tweet was on April 15--8 Helpful Accounting Software Apps For Businesses.

With its CEO saying Acumatica hopes to offer a development platform for ERP applications, the way Salesforce.com has done with CRM, the cloud company this week launched Acumatica Cloud xRP Platform. Companies will be able to develop application with Acumatica as the accounting engine. Products will bear the "powered by Acumatica" tag. Products developed this way "will appear in our catalog. The VAR network will know of their existence," says CEO Jon Roskill.