Here is the 2009 Class of VAR Stars, the first-ever awards made by Bob Scott's Insights to valued-added resellers in the mid-market financial software space. This is an award based on quality, not quantity.

In January, we posted a note saying that Terry Hicks, VP of QuickBooks Online was leaving Intuit. I got no response from Intuit PR and there was no news of Hicks leaving for a long time But in the last few days, his LinkedIn page has changed to show his job ended last month. Hicks held the job starting in January 2013 and there is no higher-profile product at Intuit than QBO. It is the product around which the company intends to build its operations.

We were told this was coming. But it was a little jarring to observe that in his keynote, Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft Business Solutions, did not mention any of the four Dynamics ERP packages by name. Dynamics CRM was cited frequently, but not AX, GP, NAV or SL. And with none of the three award-winning customer companies that came to the stage were the back office products named. It was all about CRM and the cloud.