Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission officials have asked the company for information over the past two years about transactions in seven European countries.

The government is searching for evidence that Motorola Solutions — which makes two-way radios and systems for police, fire and other public-safety organizations — may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, these people said.

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But what if you’re a company who doesn’t always sell directly to your customer, but rather relies on a reseller who stands between you and the end customer? That’s a different dynamic entirely. And it may seem like an insignificant detail until you consider that there are more than $2 trillion worth of goods sold annually through indirect business-to-business sales relationships.

Companies tend to call these “channel sales,” or use some variation of that phrase to describe this aspect of their business. And it brings with it a level of complexity that’s different from conventional direct sales.

And as Mark Geene, the CEO of Channelinsight tells me, it’s a sector of sales that has yet to benefit from the kind of productivity gains that Salesforce.com and SAP have brought to direct sales. The company has created a cloud-based service that does two things: First it aggregates live data, including inventory and point-of-sale data provided by a network of some 5,000 business-to-business resellers, distributors and retailers. Then it combines that with some screening and analytics tools that can run either as a standalone application or as an add-on to Salesforce.com. You can see who bought your stuff, who the end customer was, whether or not incentives or other programs are working, and whether or not they have inventory in the right places given demand trends.

“Indirect sales have been sort of the stepchild of salesforce automation,” Geene told me. “It hasn’t benefited at all from the kinds of things that Salesforce and SAP have been doing.” Managing indirect sales is often a rather labor-intensive process involving a lot of time looking at spreadsheets. Channelinsight’s play is to automate that process.

It must be working. Customers include printer manufacturer Lexmark and the chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, both of which sell a great deal into the channel, as well as the German industrial giant Siemens. That sounds like momentum.

Channelinsight just closed a $10 million Series C round led by Rho Ventures, with participation from Sevin Rosen Funds, Sequel Venture Partners and Vendanta Capital. Its total venture funding so far is $21 million. Paul Bartlett, a Rho Ventures Partner, is on Channelinsight’s board.

“Our expertise is in identifying and investing in companies that redefine the status quo,” Bartlett said in a statment. “Channelinsight fits this profile by reinventing the way channel sales are managed, saving companies millions of dollars in the process.”

Separately, Channelinsight said it added Ram Gupta, the former CEO of Cast Iron Systems, which IBM acquired last year, to its board of directors.

Geene is a former Oracle vice president who ran its mid-west sales, and has held senior management jobs at Tenfold and Dorado Software.

He told me one big problem companies often run into with indirect sales is screening for regulatory compliance–in particular the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which covers, among other things, bribery.

You may remember that last month IBM settled allegations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it paid bribes to officials in China and South Korea during a period beginning in 1998 and ending in 2009. IBM never admitted to any wrongdoing, though as the SEC noted, the purpose of the payments was to “secure the sale of IBM products through IBM-Korea and LG-IBM’s business partners.” Hewlett-Packard had its own headache with bribery allegations in Russia last year.

This is the sort of thing that Channelinsight can help a company watch for, Geene said. “This is a big issue for any company that works with partners,” he said. “We screen every transaction that gets processed on our system, looking for red flags.” It also looks for instances where products might be sold indirectly via partners to countries that are subject to trade embargoes. This sort of screening is something that companies have till now generally had to manage manually with some sort of custom solution.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department are investigating whether H-P committed any violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, these people said, as part of a widening probe into the company’s activities. The SEC investigates civil violations of the FCPA, while the Justice Department has jurisdiction over criminal components of the U.S. law. The law bars American companies from bribing foreign government officials anywhere in the world.

A spokeswoman for H-P said the company had discussions Thursday with the SEC regarding the German investigation “and is fully cooperating with U.S. and German authorities on this matter.”

German prosecutors have centered their investigation of the suspected bribes on one current and two former senior executives of the U.S. computer maker, according to German court records and people familiar with the probe.

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According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft (MSFT)-Yahoo (YHOO) deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown wondered whether Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO, on his trip to the Bay Area this week or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination. At least one of his reasons for being in the area was to give a talk at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. BoomTown liveblogged the session and attempted to determine Ballmer’s soul-mate status. Given some of the acquisition rumors flying around this week, BoomTown decided to conduct a little experiment. Would the same sort of “Brangelina”-esque mystique apply as well to the combination of two incredibly hot tech companies? Would it create the same hysteria, and sell as many magazines (figuratively speaking)? (Non) results on BoomTown.

MediaMemo had a Kindle-ish kind of week. Amazon (AMZN) unveiled the latest iteration of the device on Wednesday in New York, and MediaMemo was there to liveblog the whole thing, including the crazy demo, during which the location’s facilities prevented Jeff Bezos from demoing pretty much anything. Also, Bezos forget to mention the fact that Amazon will be conducting a Kindle pilot program at six colleges starting this fall. Forget about getting your hands on one, though–only five students per school will be carrying their textbooks around in a Kindle instead of a backpack. MediaMemo’s advice for cash-strapped students once the devices do become available? Wait three years until the price drops. $489 is a lot to shell out on a student’s budget.

News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch had some news this week during the company’s earnings call (besides earnings)–he believes that while the state of the economy is still dire, “the worst Is over.” He also noted that although he plans to extend WSJ’s online pay model to his strongest properties soon, News Corp. will not be selling any of its content via the Kindle, as some of its competitors will. All this and more on MediaMemo.

On Thursday, Digital Daily liveblogged a press event hosted by Google (GOOG) in advance of its annual shareholder meeting. Some of the topics covered? Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, the econalypse, YouTube, netbooks, China, antitrust issues and the Apple (AAPL) Board. CEO Eric Schmidt was most forthcoming about the Federal Trade Commission’s just-opened inquiry into Google and Apple’s overlapping boards: When asked if he’d resign from the board, he replied that the thought “hasn’t crossed his mind.” Elsewhere, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison probably ruined a few people’s mornings over at IBM (IBM) and HP (HPQ) when he told a Reuters reporter that part of his plan for Sun (JAVA) is to create an integrated hardware and software solution, effectively making their competition a little bit steeper. As such, it will be extra interesting to see how the little matter of Sun and a possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act plays itself out in the courts. Details on Digital Daily.

Over in Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg reviewed Quickoffice, a program that brings some full-fledged word processing capabilities to the iPhone, but has its limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using Macs and PCs together on the same home network, backing up and transferring Outlook Express data and whether it’s possible to find a GPS program for the iPhone that will speak its directions. In the Mossberg Solution this week, Katie Boehret reviewed the Sidekick LX and found it a little out of touch with its market. More in-depth discussion, of course, on the section of the site containing Walt’s columns.

More next week. RIP Dom Deluise.