late night ice cream

7. Channel Conflict: The VAR Guy has heard from several irate readers — each of whom is a VAR in the unified communications market. It seems as if each VAR spent thousands of dollars to train staff members on specific unified communications platforms. But the UC vendor ultimately hired the trained employees away from the VAR. This could turn ugly, and it sounds like the VARs are pursuing some sort of financial retribution as payback for the employee poaching…

6. Coming Soon: Keep an eye on Dot Hill Systems over the next few weeks…

5. Encore, Encore: Yes, Cisco Systems plan to host its popular Velocity Marketing conference in 2012. Some folks thought Cisco may kill the event after former Channel Partner Marketing VP Luanne Tierney left to join Juniper. But new Cisco Channel Marketing VP Amanda Jobbins says the conference will definitely return, with key improvements, for 2012.

4. Serious Stuff: A lot of distributors continue to talk about cloud education and cloud strategies. But we’re focused on key efforts over at Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Synnex. All three companies seem to be spending a lot of money on cloud R&D. The VAR Guy is trying to put aside some time to share a lot more thoughts on this.

3. Oracle’s Next Move: Oracle‘s Mark Hurd and John Fowler will be in New York on November 9 to launch Oracle Solaris 11. The VAR Guy concedes: He didn’t see much opportunity for Solaris amid growing competition from Windows and Linux servers. But Oracle seems to be flexing some muscle lately…

2. Always Optimistic: Chris Frey, VP of North America Commercial Channels, offered some upbeat statements after Lenovo delivered another strong quarterly earnings report. Frey was quick to note that Lenovo has leapfrogged Dell and Acer to become the world’s No. 2 PC supplier. And Frey predicted channel partners will ultimately help Lenovo jump ahead of HP into the No. 1 spot. Lenovo hopes to leverage a consumer marketing campaign that creates mind share — and market share — for Lenovo in more SMB accounts. Longer term, Frey hinted that Lenovo will up its server game as well, though Lenovo has its hands full right now with its corporate and consumer desktop and mobile strategies.

1. Goodbye for Now: This is a top six list. Always has been. Always will be. So there is no number one.