November 30, 2009
By Ted Stevenson
Just about a year ago, Enterprise VoIPplanet spoke with the folks at PIKA Technologies about their then-new WARP appliance, the popular Asterisk development platform in a compact, telephony-equipped Linux system unit.
Last week the Ottawa-based vendor of phone-related hardware and software announced the first major upgrade, WARP Enterprise.
While the original WARP appliance was designed primarily with the needs of telephony application developers in mind, WARP Enterprise is aimed at the community of VARs, SIP providers, and system integrators—organizations that would like to sell IP telephony solutions, but may not have extensive in-house development talent.
With the new upgrade, "we can bring all the convenience and flexibility of our standard WARP Appliance to VARs and system integrators who lack the in-house development expertise to make the most of it," said Terry Attwood, vice president of sales, marketing, and customer care at PIKA. "WARP Enterprise allows our customers to turn around and ship a complete PBX system to their clients in 24 hours, saving weeks and months of development effort," Attwood added.
While WARP Enterprise encompasses many refinements, according to the company, the principal addition is the pre-loading, optimization, and integration of FreePBX, the leading configuration GUI interface for Asterisk, which greatly simplifies installation and configuration., eliminating many routine development tasks. (The Asterisk code is also pre-loaded.)
PIKA's download includes FreePBXs IVR, conferencing, find-me, backup/restore, and Manager (Asterisk API) modules. Many additional modules are available at the FreePBX Website.
PIKA touted the original WARP platform as superior to PC hardware with telephony add-on cards on a number of fronts. First it is compact: roughly 9.25 x 6.5 x 2 inches. Second, it runs the famously stable Linux OS and uses solid-state storage in place of a hard drive—the most likely component of a PC to fail. Finally it avoids the "churn" of obsolescence and upgrade cycles common to PCs.
With the addition of the FreePBX interface, WARP Enterprise is just plain easier to work with.
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