PIKA's Open Source Appliance Now Compatible with FreePBX

Eyeing compatibility with technologies that are drawing more and more interest in this slower economy, a Canada-based media-processing products developer today announced that its flagship appliance works with a popular open source application.

 

Officials at Ottawa-based PIKA Technologies Inc. say their so-called WARP appliance now is compatible with the Asterisk (News - Alert)-based FrreePBX graphical user interface – a move that’s expected to give developers new options in creating voice applications.

 

According to Philippe Lindheimer, open source community director of Bandwidth.com and leader of the FreePBX project, the Web application has emerged as a standard for enterprise-grade PBX (News - Alert) functionality delivered to SMBs.

 

“But no GUI is complete without a wide range of hardware options to complete the package,” Lindheimer said. “We are delighted that PIKA can now include FreePBX in the PIKA WARP and bring our two ecosystems together.”

 

More than 3 million users have downloaded FreePBX, which provides pre-programmed functionality to help ease the work required to configure the Asterisk open-source platform – a technology that requires significant time and technical skill.

Officials at PIKA – which began to ship its WARP products (pictured right) a few months ago – say customers told them that if the appliance were compatible with GUIs such as FreePBX that they’d be more inclined to use it. PIKA says the introduction of WARP gave the market a less expensive alternative to typical off-the-shelf with plug-in voice boards for voice-application development.

 

According to Terry Atwood, vice president of sales, marketing and customer care at PIKA, the company is “very pleased” to adopt the FreePBX application to run in the PIKA Warp environment.

 

“Used in many Asterisk implementations around the world, including Trixbox, FreePBX has proven its value, time and again,” Atwood said. “When the FreePBX team expressed their willingness to work with us to port to the WARP Appliance, we jumped on the opportunity.”

 

PIKA creates media processing hardware and software that connects computer systems to TDM and IP networks. With PIKA’s products, companies design solutions in a wide range of telecommunications markets, such as IVR, call center, custom PC/IP PBX, fax and logging.

 

Open source technologies, which generally are created and improved by communities of users and developers, are gaining traction in this slower economy.

 

As TMCnet reported, one Santa Clara-based company that provides IT software, systems, services and microelectronics – in saying it would lay off up to 6,000 workers – also said it would create new business groups in its software division to focus on open source momentum. Officials at Sun Microsystems, Inc. said they would accelerate delivery of key open source platform innovations.

 

It isn’t hard to see what makes open source offerings such as FreePBX attractive. Just as PIKA’s WARP applicance is designed to bring systems such as IP-PBXs, IVRs and predictive dialing systems to SMBs, FreePBX includes features generally only found in enterprise-grade PBXs.

 

They include: unlimited number of voicemail boxes; “follow me” functionality; ring groups and call queues; unlimited number of conference bridges; and paging and intercom functionality.