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ShoreTel continues to surprise the rest of the unified communications market with its affordable and quality telephony and collaboration products. The company’s ability is based in a loyal and aggressive channel that competes for business against larger rivals. And ShoreTel is reinforcing its partners with new resources designed to keep momentum going.

Yesterday, ShoreTel took the wraps of new initiatives and resources for its Champion Partner Program that give solution providers greater and easier access to training, certification, planning and marketing resources. ShoreTel says they are intended to reinforce and enhance the support given partners.

Among the new resources is Certification Central, an education platform that offers partners access to course scheduling, certification requirements and acquired credentials. It supports ShoreTel University, which already provides Web-based, classroom and self-paced learning and certification testing. The planning and scheduling resources will make it easier for ShoreTel partners to identify certain certifications, track training and schedule course work without interfering with operations.

A big addition to the ShoreTel raft is the “Champion Partner Dashboard for Resellers.” This interface gies partners access to critical pieces of data and business intelligence through which they can eyeball their current operational status and comparative performance metrics. It provides partners snapshots of other critical pieces of intelligence, such as customer satisfaction, resource utilization and customer support contract status updates.

And ShoreTel has updated its “Reseller Store,” a portal through which solution providers can easily obtain technical and marketing materials, create custom marketing collateral, and organize and build lead generation campaigns.

All things considered, the ShoreTel partner program and resource enhancements are not all that original or unique. Individually, they’re the same as resources offered by many competitors and other vendors. What makes this collection of changes noteworthy, though, is that a company of ShoreTel’s size is making a substantial investment in partner enablement and awareness – and that’s a reflection of its commitment to partners and willingness to compete against the likes of Cisco, Polycom and Avaya.

The common denominators in ShoreTel’s program enhancements are automation and business intelligence. In Certification Central, the dashboard and the Reseller Store, ShoreTell is providing its partners with snapshot views of their status. Savvy partners will use these snapshots and business intelligence to augment their strategic and business decision-making to affect better outcomes.

While the self-service marketing resources and certification tracking module are interesting, it’s the business intelligence and comparative analysis that stands out in these ShoreTel enhancements. What will be interesting is seeing if greater access to market data will lead to greater channel sales in 2012.