In both this newsletter and in the Progressive Accountant magazine, a sister publication, I chided the American Institute of CPAs and its for-profit arm, CPA2Biz, for its handling of a press release in which the AICPA announced its new Service Organization Control reports.  The SOC reports succeed SAS 70 and are designed for companies that outsource services to third parties via the cloud. Read more...

The SBS Group, a Dynamics reseller based in Woodbridge, N.J., has continued on its path with the acquisition of Pittsburgh-based EcoSoft as part of its SBS Partner Network.  The SBS Web site is not very detailed in describing what the network is although notes the following “Partner organizations must meet and follow a detailed set of best practice guidelines and processes, participate in business and market planning sessions, utilize and market the brand assets, and collaborate with other Partners to learn and grow.”

Read more...

Sage North America has introduced a payment processing application, Sage Mobile Payments, while Intuit is extending support for mobile operating systems with GoPayment for Honeycomb, which is designed for Google's Android 3.0. This is going to be one of the hot competitive areas over the next few years. The Sage product, which is PCI compliant, has an optional card reader. Read more...

Satya Nadella, who was originally part of Microsoft Business Solutions, has been named as president of Microsoft’s server and tool business, a $15 billion operation. Nadella was originally slated to succeed Doug Burgum before he moved elsewhere in 2007. I said at the time it was Microsoft saying Nadella had too much talent to be left with something as small a part of the business as MBS. Read more...