ShoreTel (NASDAQ: SHOR), a leading provider of communication solutions that make interactions simple, today announced a new partner program for businesses and developers that build voice and SMS applications on the ShoreTel SummitTM platform.

The Summit Partner Program offers resources such as certification training, development support and co-marketing activities that enable partners to effectively develop communication applications and accelerate time to market. Partners also benefit from profiles in ShoreTel's online TechConnect Marketplace, increasing their visibility to ShoreTel's existing customer base and driving demand for their solutions or services.

"The Summit Partner Program is a natural extension of TechConnect," said Mark Roberts, CMO of ShoreTel. "The goal of TechConnect is to make it easy for businesses to integrate their solutions with ShoreTel products, while giving customers the flexibility to address their unique use cases. Summit achieves and expands upon that objective. The Summit Partner Program also allows ShoreTel to engage with new kinds of development partners and introduce our existing channel partner community to new revenue opportunities."

The program supports three types of partners – Solution, Application and Module. Solution Partners use Summit to develop custom voice and SMS applications or integrate communication capabilities into customers' existing environments. Multiple long-time ShoreTel channel partners have expanded their business to become Summit Solution Partners, including Converged Technology Professionals, Palitto Consulting Services and LANtelligence.

"Becoming a Summit Solution Partner has empowered us to quickly transform the way we approach our clients," said Joe Rittenhouse, president of business development for Converged Technology Professionals. "We can now take client data and use Summit Web services, APIs, SMS and more to deliver real-time interactions like self-help automation, credit card transaction processing or surveys, while also providing clients with the business intelligence needed to measure effectiveness. It allows us to meet our clients' goals in ways that work for them, without requiring a large capital investment."

Summit Application Partners are typically Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) or Software as a Service (SaaS) providers who offer market-ready apps built on Summit or use Summit's true Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) architecture to power communications capabilities in their flagship applications. Healthcare software provider, Callidus Health, used Summit to power their healthcare answering service and communications suite.

Finally, Summit's Module Partners provide programming components and Lua libraries that other developers can use as building blocks to enhance the capabilities of Summit apps. Companies such as VoiceBase and Next Caller have joined as Module Partners. Next Caller, for example, offers a module that lets developers extend a Summit voice application with Advanced Caller ID capabilities, matching incoming phone numbers with over 70 data points to provide detailed customer or prospect information in real time.

"Next Caller's goal is to improve sales and support processes with more reliable caller data," said Jeff Kirchick, vice president of enterprise sales for Next Caller. "As a Summit Module Partner, we can make this possible for both developers and their end users. The Next Caller library for Summit helps developers enrich their voice apps with real-time caller data so that sales teams or contact center agents can engage with prospects and customers in a more meaningful way."

Source: ShoreTel media announcement