The VAR Guy spent most of last week at Cisco Partner Summit, chasing rumors and also asking CEO John Chambers some tricky questions about the recent COO decision. Now, it’s time for The VAR Guy to get caught up on the rest of his work. Here are six channel partner blogs The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending March 4, 2011.

7. Worth Watching: Novell unveiled a SUSE Manager, a management platform for Novell and Red Hat environments. The management tool supports physical, virtual and cloud environments running SUSE Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, Novell says. The move comes as Attachmate prepares to complete its buyout of Novell.

6. Channel Chief Moves: A well-known open source company is set to make some adjustments to its channel team. The VAR Guy is digging for details now and hopes to share official information with readers within the next few days.

5. Cooperating and Competing: When Cisco unveiled the Cloud Partner Program last week, the networking giant described VMware, Citrix and Red Hat as key partners in the virtualization market. Left off the discussion list: Microsoft Hyper-V. Still, a Cisco spokeswoman notes that Cisco and Microsoft continue to work on multiple fronts. “As I mentioned we have several validated designs with Microsoft,” wrote the Cisco spokeswoman in an email. “And recently announced via our Blog, that Cisco Joined Microsoft Fast Track Program.”

4. Listening… From Afar: The VAR Guy doesn’t plan to attend — or crash — this week’s Xchange Solution Provider conference in Orlando, Fla. It’s an EverythingChannel event, so surfacing at the conference uninvited would be in poor taste. However, our resident blogger will keep his earns open for news and rumors from the conference.

3. Food for Thought: The VAR Guy and his blogging team expect to meet Trend Micro CEO Even Chen for breakfast this week. Among the key topics set for discussion: How will Trend Micro push beyond security into cloud storage? And how will that effort involve channel partners?

3. Planning to Attend: The VAR Guy has confirmed plans to attend Lenovo Channel Partner Forum, set for May 16-18 in Las Vegas. Our resident blogger plans to investigate how Lenovo will connect the dots between SMB servers, desktops, notebooks and emerging mobile devices. Plus, The VAR Guy wonders if Lenovo will announce any news steps with the Intel Hybrid Cloud — which links SMB servers to cloud services.

2. More Than Margins: At Cisco Partner Summit’s closing session, Executive VP Rob Lloyd warned channel partners to avoid the path toward low-margin products. It was a thinly veiled attack on Hewlett-Packard. But perhaps more importantly, Lloyd described some changes to Cisco’s VIP program for partners. Multiple partners, each of whom requested anonymity, said the VIP changes were urgently needed due to some other margin-sensitive changes Cisco had made to its partner program compensation plan. Hewlett-Packard will have its chance to counter Cisco’s moves during the HP Americas Partner Conference later this month.

1. Check the Headline: This forever remains a Top Six list so there is no Number 1. That’s all for now — though The VAR Guy and his team of merry bloggers will be back soon with more content.

Thanks for reading. The VAR Guy appreciates the dialog with you.

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