The VAR Guy remains pulled in multiple directions. On the one hand, he’s packing for a vacation. On the other, he’s busy helping the Nine Lives Media Inc. team to build something “new.” And on the third hand (many hands lighten the load, of course…) The VAR Guy needs to keep bloggin’ away. With all that in mind here are six channel partner blog entries The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending November 19, 2010.

7. SaaS Leader Makes Move: Former Salary.com CEO Kent Plunkett has joined Intronis as CEO, replacing founder Sam Guttman (who remains chairman). Plunkett previously built Salary.com into a publicly held SaaS company. So will he do the same for Intronis? Hmmm… Plunkett notes that it takes 15 years to build a great company and Intronis was launched in 2003. Translation: He’s in no rush to take Intronis out to public markets. Stay tuned; Plunkett sat down for a FastChat earlier today. Stay tuned.

6. New Roles Within CompTIA?: A few tipsters say CompTIA may be reorganizing a bit ahead of the New Year… Hmmm… Also, watch for some long-rumored CompTIA board members announcements in the December timeframe, The VAR Guy hears.

5. Strong Earnings: Despite Dell’s recent social media channel silence the company seems to be bouncing back, having announced rather impressive earnings during for its most recently quarterly results.

4. Breaking Their Silence: OnForce, an online marketplace that allows VARs to bid on customer engagement, delivered two interesting moves this week. A new OnForce Project Management offering enables companies to have OnForce dispatch and manage resources for service work, on a pay-per-project basis, on demand. Plus, a new OnForce Network Builder helps companies to  build a nation-wide pool of skilled and available IT and CE service professionals. On the news front, OnForce has been pretty quiet in 2010 but it The VAR Guy plans to catch up with CEO Peter Cannone soon.

3. Showing Some Flexibility?: With Office 365, Microsoft intends to let some super-large service providers handle SaaS billing on their own. But the service providers will need to wrap unique services around Office 365 in order to gain the power of customer billing. In stark contrast, small VARs and MSPs still need to rely on Microsoft billing SaaS end-customers directly. Still, The VAR Guy hears Microsoft is monitoring partner pushback pretty darn closely…

2. Powerful Trio: Dave O’Callaghan, VP of worldwide commercial sales at Cisco Systems, has been spending considerable time with Channel Chief Edison Peres and Senior VP Wendy Bahr in recent months. Peres sees three key cloud opportunities for Cisco partners. And Bahr is exploring new routes to market for partners. O’Callaghan, hardly surprising, intends to leverage those nuggets of info within Cisco’s commercial and SMB channel strategy. More thoughts from O’Callaghan soon…

1. Check the Headline: The VAR Guy still doesn’t play by the rules. This remains a top-six blog, which means there’s never a number one.

That’s all for now… but our resident blogger might be back soon with more updates. Stay tuned.

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