Felt it only fair to update this blog thread about Symantec, which has issued a couple of clarifications about its direct engagement strategy and its subscription renewal policies based on comments made by COO Enrique Salem.

I still feel strongly that uncertainty makes this great timing for other security vendors to reconsider and rediscuss their relationships with their own partners. But the subtle nuances of what’s going on with Symantec’s program underscore how very “gray” most partner relationships will be when they transcend paper into reality. The fact is, customers deserve their needs to be met just as much as partners, so there will always be a balancing act. That is something that any reasonable VAR will understand. As much as we’d like a program to be black and white, that’s never going to happen. Transparency is quite simply the best policy in matters like this. Expect to read and hear more on this issue.

Even though it’s getting hotter here in the earthly realm, apparently hell is attempting to freeze over.

So far in the last 18 months, Dell has held out an entire olive tree to the channel and is taking steps to create a meaningful program. Now Symantec, which has been a friend of VARs, resellers and distributors for what seems like a million years in tech time, is having its own mid-life crisis and embracing the misguided notion that direct sales will drive more revenue than maintaining lots of supposedly inefficient channel relationships.

ChannelWeb, the Everything Channel news site, breaks the story today that Symantec COO Enrique Salem has privately told Wall Street analysts that it will take about 900 of its largest customers direct AND take over the subscription renewal process for its small and midsize customers. You can read the entire story here.

The classic argument that has been given for this move to Wall Street is that taking these sales direct will streamline and cut costs for Symantec. (Sound familiar all you Hewlett-Packard VARs out there.)

On paper, at least, there’s no doubt there will be a short-term benefit to doing this. But what happens as the renewal stream tapers off? Or, as larger midsize companies that grow into enterprise account territory are told they can no longer work with the IT services consultants that have worked alongside them for years?

Let me think about this. Hmmmm. Say I’m a security VAR that has an opportunity to win an entirely new account with both equipment and managed security services. Do I recommend technologies and services from Symantec, knowing that I will get only a one-time margin cut, maybe, or do I team up with McAfee or Trend Micro or Sophos or one of the other emerging security companies and create a long-term customer relationship for both my company and my vendor?

I guess we’ll have to wait to see what kind of damage control Symantec’s two very capable channel executives, global vice president Julie Parrish and Americas vice president of channel sales Randy Cochran, can pull off.

It’s sad to see Symantec prepare to walk down this path. The good news for the channel is that there are plenty of security vendors to fill the void.

My colleagues at SWOT Management Group will attest to the fact that I have plenty of opinions about what’s going on in the world of so-called green technology.

I write about green IT daily on my GreenTech Pastures blog for ZDNet, and I’ve been asked to speak about the “Green Desktop” at the upcoming Breakaway conference being held next month in Orlando, Fla., by the Computing Technology Industry Association.

One thing that has both perplexed and troubled me over the 11 months I’ve been writing about this topic regularly is the relative disconnect between the professed green strategies of some of the high-tech industry’s biggest players and their business partner and reseller channels. There’s been plenty of corporate-level noise but very little in the way of bonafide messaging or tools that the companies’ channels could apply to their own green message.

Sun Microsystems stands out as a vendor that moved early and publicly to include its VARs in it green messaging. Here’s some more information about that in my GreenTech Pastures blog as well as in this backgrounded about the Sun Eco Advantage program.

Slowly but surely, I believe the disconnect will disappear, although the innovation won’t necessarily come from the biggest companies out there. One example is AFCO Systems, which last week launched a channel program specifically aimed at VARs with green data center practices. AFCO figures it can get a leg up on the competition by filling a gap here and providing products and services that make upgrades easier to pull off.

APC, the leading UPS vendor in the channel, also has developed some resources that its resellers can use in green technology discussions. Called the APC TradeOff Tools, the company now enables either VARs or data center managers to run different planning scenarios that are broken down into small processes. Included are a Carbon Calculator for looking at how loads, locations and design efficiency will impact a company’s carbon footprint; an Energy Efficiency Calculator for profiling electrical costs; a Capital Cost Calculator for studying how load, cooling and power infrastructure will affect outlays; a Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator that studies the impact of server virtualization; a Power Sizing Calculator that looks at utility power needed for a particular data center design; an InRow Containment Selector for creating rack and row prototype configurations; and an AC vs. DC Power Calculator.

The channel needs more programs and tools like these. Why should the vendors be the only ones to profit from green tech talk?