We knew Symantec was planning to evolve its SaaS strategy, but they’d been playing their hand close to their chest. Rewind a couple of years, and many of Symantec’s initial SaaS moves involved the company’s fledgling Symantec Protection Network system. But now, Symantec is reaching out to public clouds — and embracing Amazon Web Services and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It’s a significant strategy — but where do partners fit in?

First, some background: Symantec CEO Enrique Salem is careful not to hype SaaS market opportunities; he expects 15 percent (or about $1 billion) of Symantec’s revenue to come from SaaS within the next five years. Adrian Chamberlain, VP of SaaS at Symantec, is the person responsible for finding that SaaS revenue.

So, how will Symantec cash in on SaaS? One possible answer involves Amazon’s ever-growing cloud. Two Symantec offerings are now available as Amazon EC2 instances:

Both products are pay-per-hour, in custom Amazon Machine Images (AMI). Symantec has set up a web site with more details about its Amazon Web Services strategy. The big question: Is there an opportunity for Symantec’s channel partners to participate in the Amazon effort?

Symantec’s press statement makes no mention of partners. But we hope to speak with the company’s channel team in the days ahead about a range of 2010 priorities. We’ll be sure to ask about the Amazon effort during the conversation.

We also want to keep the Amazon news in perspective: At the recent Symantec Partner Engage conference in Orlando, CEO Salem pointed out that most Symantec partner revenue opportunities would remain on-premise.

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