Philippe Lindheimer's archive

PIKA WARP Appliance Adds FreePBX Support

by VoIP & Gadgets Blog in November 18th, 2008

Topics: Asterisk, Bandwidth.com, David Clarke, PIKA WARP Appliance, Philippe Lindheimer, SIP, TMCnet, Terry Atwood, Unified Communications, VoIP, appliance, bandwidth, freepbx, freepbx support

When I met with PIKA Technologies at ITEXPO they told me support for FreePBX was coming. Well today, PIKA Technologies announced that PIKA WARP the Appliance is now compatible with the Asterisk-based FreePBX GUI (Graphical User Interface) application. I reviewed the PIKA Appliance recently and was pretty impressed with it. Having FreePBX support is a huge milestone for the PIKA Appliance. FreePBX is a popular user-friendly web application that makes it easy to setup and configure Asterisk.

According to PIKA, “While customers often develop their own GUIs, many have told PIKA that if WARP were compatible with industry-standard GUIs like FreePBX, they would be much more inclined to adopt the portfolio. With today’s announcement, PIKA has once again demonstrated its responsiveness to the needs of its user base.”

“We are very pleased to have supported the effort to adopt the FreePBX application to run in the PIKA Warp environment,” said Terry Atwood, vice president of sales, marketing and customer care at PIKA Technologies. “Used in many Asterisk implementations around the world, including Trixbox, FreePBX has proven its value, time and again. When the FreePBX team expressed their willingness to work with us to port to the Warp Appliance, we jumped on the opportunity.”

“FreePBX has become the de facto standard for enterprise grade PBX functionality delivered to the SMB business and includes a very rich set of functionality and customization potential,” said Philippe Lindheimer, open source community director of Bandwidth.com and leader of the FreePBX project. “But no GUI is complete without a wide range of hardware options to complete the package. We are delighted that PIKA can now include FreePBX in the PIKA WARP and bring our two eco-systems together.”

Today’s announcement from PIKA follows news of a new partnership between FreePBX and Bandwidth.com, a complete business communications provider offering advanced VoIP, Internet services and managed network services to small and medium businesses. Bandwidth.com will devote significant resources to expand the scope of FreePBX while protecting its charter to remain open source and free.

“The partnership with Bandwidth.com is great news as it gives FreePBX the support it needs to grow while ensuring it remains a free GUI for the entire open source eco-system,” said David Clarke, business development manager at PIKA and director of the PIKA Warp Community. “I know the choice of Bandwidth.com was a decision that Philippe made only after months of consideration and sound input from the key developers and contributors to the FreePBX project.”

Out of the box, FreePBX provides a long list of features including many typically found only in an enterprise-grade PBX, some examples are:

• Unlimited number of voicemail boxes
• “Follow me” functionality
• Ring groups and call queues
• Unlimited number of conference bridges
• Paging and intercom functionality
• and much more

The PIKA WARP Appliance product portfolio is ideal for deploying small- to medium-sized IP-PBX systems, IVR self-service systems, predictive dialling systems, fax servers and many other features typical of a traditional, purpose-built business telephone system that are often lacking in a computerized system. Compatible with a variety of open-source development platforms, including Asterisk and Linux, the Appliance offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional off-the-shelf computers and plug-in-card network connectivity in a smaller footprint.

Tags: Asterisk, Bandwidth.com, David Clarke, FreePBX, Philippe Lindheimer, PIKA WARP Appliance, Terry Atwood, voip

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Bandwidth.com invests in FreePBX

by VoIP & Gadgets Blog in November 14th, 2008

Topics: Asterisk, Philippe Lindheimer, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP, bandwidth, com, freepbx, philippe, phillipe

Bandwidth.com has just made an investment in FreePBX, the popular front-end interface to Asterisk-based distros. I discussed this news with Philippe Lindheimer just a couple hours ago. One of the questions I asked was if Bandwidth.com would get “preferred treatment” within the FreePBX interface, since Bandwidth.com offers SIP trunking. Obviously, if FreePBX gives Bandwidth.com a prominent position in the GUI or they make it “easier” to configure FreePBX (i.e. plug-n-play) that could be a huge boon to Bandwidth.com Philippe said that that isn’t part of the investment announcement being made today, however, that is something they are looking at.

As for the purpose of the investment, Philippe said it was mostly due to Bandwidth.com’s desire to grow the market and help build the FreePBX community. The idea is that the more IP-PBXs out there, the more SIP trunks, and hence more revenue for Bandwidth.com. I have some further thoughts on this, but I’m pretty busy today and wanted to share the news.

Philippe Lindheimer said, “Part of assuring the success of FreePBX is to make sure that we continue to have strong leadership, community participation and a thriving eco-system of users and partners. I would like to announce a new partnership that will help the project tremendously. I have joined forces with Bandwidth.com as their Open Source Community Director, where we will be devoting significant resources and effort to expand the scope of FreePBX while protecting its charter to make sure it remains open and strong.”

One significant piece of news is that Bandwidth.com helped protect the FreePBX’s project several months ago when the FreePBX trademark (which FreePBX.org nor Phillipe never owned) was “being shopped around to parties that did not have this project’s best interest in mind” according to Phillipe. Thus, Bandwidth.com preemptively purchased the trademark with Phillipe’s blessing in order to assure FreePBX was not jeopardized.

You can read Phillipe’s blog post about this here which has more details.

Tags: asterisk, Bandwidth, com, FreePBX, Philippe Lindheimer, voip

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