SmartVault, which makes online document storage, has received $4.5 million in second-round funding. The investors include the founders of CyrusOne and original investors in Softlayer. The company said the capital will enable it to accelerate development of its core offering and to scale operations to support its integration of the online storage capability with Intuit's Lacerte and ProSeries professional tax preparation products.

Sage is suggesting accounting firms are the key to its ability to sell its web-based Sage One application in the United States. While the product is in its early days in this country, its penetration lags and it will take a long time to establish the cloud application here, Steve Kelly, the new chief executive, said in this week's webcast of fiscal 2014 results.

Intuit will increasingly shift its software pricing towards a usage-based model. That approach will show up across the board in the company's payments, payroll and accounting products, according to Neil Williams, Intuit's CFO. The shift is in line with trends brought about by web-based software products.

Sage has introduced an analytical tool called Sage View that the company says will help accountants  provide advisory services to client. But software publishers introduced those kinds of tools in the early 2000s and they went nowhere. So what does Sage think is different now?