Officials of snom have announced another VAR training opportunity, this time in Austin, Texas, on March 28-29.

These events are great ways to get hands-on experience with snom phones and equipment, and to take a look at how they work with such related products and platforms as Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync. They include classroom training sessions, and if you want to become Certified Value Added Reseller for snom products, you need to take those sessions. Individuals who successfully complete the course will be certified “snom Certified Engineers” (SCEs).

Register at the link given above.

The sessions in Austin will give participants valuable experience with the newest version of the snom ONE IP PBX (News - Alert) as well as the new snom UC and snom 7xx series phones. Company officials say other sessions include “instruction on snom’s integration with Microsoft Lync 2010 and the addition of voice features to the Lync environment.”

snom officials note that while there are no formal prerequisites for the program, to make it worth your while -- and there is -- you should really know TCP/IP, SIP, VoIP and telecommunication technologies pretty well, and have some familiarity with snom products.

Mike Storella (News - Alert), COO, snom technology, recently shared some thoughts on the year just gone, recapping snom’s highlights. Assuming that the Mayans weren’t correct, and that there will be a full and complete 2012, he looks forward to that as well.

Storella notes the proliferation of Microsoft Lync in 2011, as well as a “significant leap in snom’s ongoing maturation” as a VoIP provider in both Microsoft Lync and IP PBX environments, including their status as “the first and only desktop phone maker to offer standards-based SIP desktop phones qualified for use with Lync.”

He recalls that snom launched what he calls “the industry’s broadest portfolio of Lync qualified and compatible IP phones with the introduction of snom UC, a portfolio of unified communications-ready desktop phones.”