Skype has announced the introduction of the Skype Channel Partner Program to help businesses who are looking to use Skype for their collaboration and communication needs. According to Skype, the goal of the program is to establish a qualified network of channel partners in the United States that can assist companies interested in using Skype “to improve their productivity and optimize their communication costs.”

With its acquisition of TANDBERG recently completed, Cisco and the video technology company are probably eager to get all of their ducks walking in formation. To do that they need to combine their respective partner programs, but doing that will take some time.

According to company execs at Cisco's partner event, the companies will run their channel partner programs in parallel for the time being. They plan to combine the programs into a new unified channel partner program for their video offerings in about nine months. Currently, all of TANDBERG's products have been migrated into the Cisco TelePresence Technology Group. The combo program will feature the best of breed parts from Cisco's and TANDBERG's original partner programs and attempt to preserve the margins partners on both sides are used to.

For more:
- read this report

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VoIP Supply is taking a tip from car dealerships and offering a buyback plan to help businesses make the decision to upgrade their VoIP equipment.

With the down economy putting pressure on companies trying to decide whether to save money or stick with what they have now or spend money now to save money on costs later by upgrading to better IP communications equipment, VoIP Supply has launched its Reclaim buyback program. Companies can sell their old equipment to the supplier in exchange for credit towards new purchases or even direct payout. I'd wager VoIP Supply is thinking the move will ultimately result in more customers buying from them once they start doing deals.

According to Benjamin Sayers, CEO of VoIP Supply, they hope this program will make it easier for companies to justify the costs of investing in new upgraded technology.

For more:
- read this article

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Empirix, a provider of VoIP monitoring solutions, announced that its products are now compliant with key contact center solutions from Avaya.

The Empirix Proactive Communications Assurance solution is now compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya AuraTM Communication Manager on Avaya S8700 servers with MCC1 Media Gateways and Avaya Proactive Contact with PG230RM.

Google Wave, the web-based collaboration product Google unveiled in May, is signing up 100,000 beta users to test the service, according to Daily Tech. The new users will gain access to the file sharing and real-time collaboration platform September 30, the next step to a full public launch of the application.

The Wave product gained buzz after being announced at Google's Developer conference May 27, and at least on its face, looks like it could be a challenger to UC product makers, especially in the SMB space. 

For more:
- see the Daily Tech article on the beta program expansion here

TringMe has announced a method of marrying VoIP with PHP - VoicePHP.
The Bangalore, India-based startup, describes VoicePHP as an extension of PHP that now outputs voice instead of text and also takes input as voice instead of text.