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September 16, 2008
PIKA WARP Appliance Adopted by Schmooze for SMB IP-PBXBy Arun Satapathy, TMCnet Contributing Editor PIKA Technologies (News - Alert) has announced today that Schmooze Communications, LLC has chosen its PIKA WARP Appliance as the hardware component in a new line of its PBXact business telephone systems.
PIKA started to supply the WARP product portfolio in June. WARP is less expensive, more reliable and compact in comparison with off-the-shelf computers with plug-in voice cards for voice-application deployment. Also, WARP appliances are compatible with both Asterisk (News - Alert) and FreeSWITCH.
"We're thrilled to welcome an innovative PBX (News - Alert) system builder like Schmooze Communications to our growing community of PIKA WARP users," said Terry Atwood, PIKA's vice president of sales, marketing and customer care. "We created the appliance expressly to provide customers like Schmooze with an embedded solution ideal for feature-rich and cost-effective phone systems for business."
Schmooze specializes in IP-PBX systems for small, medium and large enterprises built on open standards. The company's online wizard eases the configuration process by having customers fill out a questionnaire that is fed into an automated software system.
For example, Schmooze's automated system takes about 15 minutes for a 200-phone install configuration that could take a full day to configure manually. And, customers' configurations are done for them prior to shipping.
FreePBX is a graphical user interface (GUI) applications that provides pre-programmed functionality for users wanting to ease the configuration of the Asterisk open-source platform. FreePBX when combined with PIKA WARP the Appliance provides developers with a superior solution for cost-effective, scaleable and customizable business phone systems.
"When we surveyed the market for an embedded hardware product for our PBXact system, PIKA's WARP appliance was clearly the market leader," said Lewis. "When it comes to embedded appliances, WARP has the best feature set and the most flexibility at the best price. WARP allows us to easily roll out a stable, price-competitive phone system to our small-to-medium business market segment. While this market segment continues to be dominated by less functional key systems, we believe the WARP appliance with its new software enhancements will provide us with the ability to compete in this market and provide customers with much more functionality and future resilience for the price."
Schmooze has also recently added other product lines, such as the Schmooze Magic Button, a speech recognition platform. The Magic Button one’s voice can control any function on a phone normally performed by a complicated combination of key presses and star codes.
PIKA Technologies, Inc., is a Gold sponsor of Communications Developer Conference, the first and only IP Communications Developer event, collocated with INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO — the biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year. Communications Developer and ITEXPO (News - Alert) s taking place in Los Angeles, California, September 16-18, 2008, featuring three valuable days of exhibits, conferences, and networking opportunities you can’t afford to miss. Visit PIKA at booth #102 in the exhibit hall.
Arun Satapathy is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Arun's articles, please visit his columnist page. Edited by Stefania Viscusi |