Pika Technologies, which sells media-processing hardware and software, has announced that its Pika for Asterisk family of analog and digital boards is now compatible with Fonality's (News - Alert) trixbox CE, an Asterisk-based IP-PBX product.


Terry Atwood, vice president of sales, marketing and customer care at Pika, said compatibility with trixbox CE "opens a wider audience to Pika's media processing software and hardware."

The Pika for Asterisk (News - Alert) suite comprises hardware and software designed to support applications built on the open-source Asterisk platform. These building blocks are designed to provide network connectivity to bridge between legacy networks and Asterisk-based IP telephony applications.

With the low-density PCI analog board, the analog FXO (trunk) and the FXS (station) boards from Pika's Daytona product family and the PrimeNet digital T1/E1 boards, the portfolio of Pika for Asterisk boards supports the latest trixbox CE version 2.4, as well as the previous 2.2 version.

The full suite of Asterisk-based products has been developed using Pika's media-processing platform, including hardware (DSP) and software-based echo cancellation.

Trixbox is available in multiple configurations, including the Community Edition, which launched in 2004 as Asterisk@Home, and the newest commercial product, trixbox Pro, a hybrid hosted product.

Last October Pika announced the results of an analysis of the usage habits of over 300 Asterisk developers across the globe, finding the Asterisk platform is "becoming much more prevalent in the enterprise."

"Some of the most compelling data that we collected was simply around the wide variety of applications that Asterisk is now being used to address," said Terry Atwood. "Of course, the early adopters are still there, but from a purpose and density standpoint there is now a much broader range of applications being built on Asterisk."

Common applications being built on Asterisk included normal office telephone systems, IVR/self-service systems, systems for use in inbound and outbound call centers, and hosted telephone and VoIP long distance systems.

Results also show that the main Linux distributions being used by Asterisk developers in the study are CentOS (34 percent), Debian 4 (20 percent) and Fedora (16 percent). Ubuntu (News - Alert) and Slackware are both being used by about 6 percent of developers surveyed, with a host of other platforms being used by less than 1 percent each.

The analysis was conducted as a result of a free board giveaway program, run by Pika during July and August 2007. The program allowed Asterisk developers to order one of Pika's analog or digital Asterisk boards free of charge. Signing up for a board required imparting some detailed information about the Asterisk environment.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

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