Erel, thanks. I had someone help me wrap the Android_Pusher, apparently that library has been depreciated since Nov. However, we were able to get it to register and subscribe to the intended channel. Trying to use it more for realtime asynchronous communication of other apps I've written. Going to look into GCM later today and how far I might be able to take it, have used simple downloading of a url to initiate a call to my webscript that pushes out to systems via growl and the web based pusher monitor channels.
In the meantime, I think I found a newer official library released in Feb.. Also looks like it might be workable with both, it states: "The library has also joined the global Java ecosystem; releases are now published to Maven Central, where they are available to all without additional repositories in your builds."