Within moments of taking the stage at the Symantec Partner Engage conference this morning, Chief Operating Officer Enrique Salem answered the unspoken question on The VAR Guy’s mind. Here’s what Salem said, along with five themes from his keynote.

First, the unspoken question: Is Symantec really committed to partners?

The answer: “The majority of the business has gone through our channel partners and that will not change,” said Salem. “As we think about our future, it’s inextricably linked to all of you. Make no mistake about all that.”

The statement was a thinly veiled effort to close the book on controversial comments Salem had made about Symantec’s partner program in mid-2008.

Here are other highlights:

1. The economy: “No company is immune to the economic environment,” conceded Salem. However, “We should be able to outperform the market and gain market share given the strength of our product portfolio.”

Salem pointed to two key data points that identify a clear opportunity for partners. The doubling of storage needs every 12 to 18 months, and 37 percent server utilization rates.

Partners that take those storage utilization rates to 60 to 70 percent, he said, will show real ROI from customers.

Also, Data Loss Prevention, Compliance and Archiving remain the big opportunities for Symantec and partners, said Salem.

2. Areas of investment: He also hinted that the big area of investment will be end-point virtualization. The other big investment area is SaaS. More and more of Symantec products will move from on-premise to SaaS, and that will be an opportunity for partners, he assured attendees.

The VAR Guy plans to dig for more info today about Symantec’s strategy for the Symantec Protection Network, a SaaS platform that initially supports storage but will gain security hooks soon.

3. On Symantec complexity: “We need to make it easier to do business with Symantec.” One example: Providing partners with a single, consistent phone number where they can receive consistent answers from Symantec. The VAR Guy will ask for more info about this later today.

4. Product quality: Symantec Endpoint Protection just gained its third round of enhancements. Salem conceded that Symantec stubbed its toe a bit with the product’s initial quality.

Translation: Partners have been saying exactly what The VAR Guy heard. Symantec Endpoint Protection wasn’t ready for prime time during its initial release.

5. Open collaborative architecture: Salem promised the architecture will transform point products into comprehensive solutions that snap together.

More content to follow today — assuming The VAR Guy gets his hands on a few more lattes.