Much of the summer was devoted to channel and vendor discussion of the demise of the MIS Group, Sage’s Partner of the Year for  the year ended September 30, 2008. And true, for that Houston-based business to exit was notable. Originally a Timberline VAR, it had grown by buying other Timberline VARs, but also MicroAccounting Systems and the Enterprise Resource Group, whose operations were centered on Sage’s MAS line.  But there are other signs that it’s not so easy being big. Early in 2009, Skyytek, which had been NetSuite’s largest VAR, and NetSuite, got into a nasty court fight about the circumstances regarding Skyytek’s exit from the NetSuite channel program. Then on July 14, Tectura, the largest Microsoft Dynamics VAR, filed a Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities with the SEC that said it had sold $7.5 million in securities on June 30 and that had another $2.5 million to sell. (It didn’t indicate that the sale of the remainder was inevitable.)  Tectura CEO Terry Petrzelka said the company swapped debt for equity to clean up the balance sheet.  But I don’t see businesses willingly giving away pieces of ownership lightly. On June 26, Qurius, a large Dynamics VAR headquartered in Belgium, announced it was seeking approval for a share issue valued at roughly $1.4 million “to meet a postponed acquisition payment.” Read more...

SpeedTax says that much of the interest for its Internet-based sales-and-use tax system is coming from larger companies and that has led the Laguna Hills, Calif.-based vendor to enlist consultants that serve that market. “We've been driven or requested to move more up market,” says SpeedTax president Anton Donde, who continues that high-end consultants are making those requests because sales are drying up in the upper market. To make the move possible, SpeedTax has written an integration with SAP’s R3 platform.  Donde claims the feature set was already scalable and feature-rich enough to support large enterprises, but that SpeedTax lacked the channel that could serve them. Set-up fees, of course, will be higher and he estimated that fees for an SAP installation could be $30,000 or higher. Large end users will benefit from volume pricing since they will have a much larger transaction volume than mid-market users. Read more...