A Mississippi CPA, whose crimes included under-reporting income from the sale of his own firm, has been sentenced to five years in prison. Carl Nicholson was convicted February 8 of conspiracy to defraud the United States, along with six counts of aiding in the preparation of false tax returns and four counts of filing false tax returns.

For resellers, the issue now is meeting user needs and making money, not worrying about whether software is in the cloud. Certainly, there are many thousands of on-premise mid-market accounting systems in use and a decent number are being sold. But the action is in the cloud and it is a matter of features, which is what users really care about. The issue is which product is better at handling nonprofits, which is good for businesses with inventory, which best suits professional services and which delve into highly specialized markets. In the fact, the thought did not even occur this year to count how many of the Top 100 2019 VARs carry cloud products. It was just assumed they all do. That is why this year’s theme is “The Cloud Rules”  If you are not in the cloud game, you are not really in the game.

Armanino has launched the Armanino AI Lab this week. Designed for business executives who want to deploy AI technologies within their organization, the lab is designed to educate decision makers in a pragmatic approach to utilizing AI tools.