It only took only day this week for new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to confirm what the technology press was saying – that former Skype CEO Tony Bates and former Great Plains executive Tami Reller, are leaving the company. People asked me this week why Reller is leaving and unless one of the parties decides to spell it out, we may never know. Bates' departure seems obvious. Reuters coverage said he was passed over for the CEO job. In a letter to Microsoft employees on March 1, Nadella wrote, "Tony Bates has decided this is the right time for him to look for his next opportunity."

Channel veteran Joe Corigliano has become the head of channel recruiting for a VP of global partners and alliances for BI vendor, Targit. And discussions with Targit representatives show that his job is to essentially relaunch a program that previously has not been very channel friendly. Corigliano's experience goes back to the former State of the Art before its purchase by Sage, but after the serfs were freed (in ancient history when the company canned CEO David Samuels).

The last newsletter issue had an item whose headline includes the words, "Son of Stampede." It reported plans for a November GP conference in Fargo, N .D., that were posted on the Inside Dynamics GP blog on Microsoft's website with a date and a call for suggestions for a name. The original post by product manager, Pam Misialek, has disappeared, but another referring to it and a handful of Tweets that were sent suggesting names, were still up. The idea must have gone some distance up the approval ladder from the number of people that had heard about it.

Dan Means, who came up through the business as a reseller for the former SBT Accounting Systems, died at the end of February. His family posted a notice this week on his Facebook page, attributing his death to cardiac tamponade. While known to many from his SBT days, for the last few years, he had sold Xtuple, an open source accounting system and was its top reseller in 2012. He owned Mission Viejo, Calif.-based Next-erpsystem from January 2008. His LinkedIn page says he had implemented more than 50 ERP/manufacturing systems based on the Xtuple/OpenMFG platform and more than 150 on SBT's Pro Series.