Sage North America has hired Microsoft veteran Donald Deshaies as the new VP of channel management. Deshaies has been out of the midmarket channel for four years while serving as managing partner of Live Consulting Global from November 2009 through 2013. But before that he was with Microsoft (including Great Plains before its acquisition) for one month short of 14 years.

Xero has named its first CEO for its North American operations and the New Zealand-based cloud software company and also added some board-level talent to its operations on this continent. The company has hired Peter Karpas as CEO. Karpas was most recently VP and GM for PayPal's North America Small and Medium Business. Karpas had held that post since September 2012 he held a Canadian VP position with Paypal from September 2010.

Cloud company Adaptive Planning has changed its name to Adaptive Insights. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company says the rebranding "reflects Adaptive's broad and innovative product suite as the company rapidly expands its customer base and further cements its leadership in enterprise and international markets." If you look at the list of product names on the company's website - in which Adaptive Planning is only one of several products - the change makes a good deal of sense. 

Sage has introduced a Certified Implementer Program and it is worrying some key resellers. Technically, it is called the Sage Mid-Market Certified Implementation Partner Program and it applies to a wide range of products: Sage 100, 300 and 500; X3, CRM, Fixed Assets and HRMS; and BusinessWorks and BusinessVision. The program's description says CIPs are "organizations or individuals not associated with an authorized reseller organization that focus on professional services, including consulting, and implementation of Sage products for end-customers."