Pika Brings Skype to Enterprise Telephony
I dropped by the Pika Technologies labs in Kanata yesterday to get a look at Pika Connect for Skype. Field trials started yesterday, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.  Pika’s core business is selling boards, and a software layer, to allow companies to create PC based telephony solutions. They’ve recently been adding support for software only systems to that layer, and yesterday unveiled their Skype support.Â
What I saw was a Skype user ID routing calls into Asterisk, to IVRs, ordinary Asterisk extensions, conference rooms and so on. What that means is that businesses running Asterisk (think EBay sellers), can publish a Skype ID as well as an ordinary phone number, and Skype users will come in through the standard phone system — CRM and all. In fact, the system is so smart, that it will pluck the Skype users telephone number from their profile, and present that as caller ID, so that the CRM system simply sees a Skype customer like any other kind of customer.
Pika has created a practical gateway from Skype to the PSTN which doesn’t require you to buy Skype-Out minutes. More importantly, they’ve built a platform for bringing Skype to enterprise telephony applications.
Waaaaay cool!Â
Check out the whitepaper online. And, if you’re at the EBay DevCon next week, I understand folks from Pika will be there too.Â
June 10th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Global Crossing announces VoIP Peering…
Global Crossing announced the re-release of our VoIP services portfolio at GlobalComm this week, which essentially means that we added a variety of new VoIP related features, both to the VoIP platform (VoIP Peering, Voice VPN) as well as the IP-VPN net…
June 11th, 2006 at 3:48 am
take a look at: http://www.qoollabs.com/ they make much more
June 12th, 2006 at 8:32 am
[...] – Canadian phone company Pika has developed a technical solution to combine Skype and an Asterisk server. Alec Saunder has a write-up on it: “What I saw was a Skype user ID routing calls into Asterisk, to IVRs, ordinary Asterisk extensions, conference rooms and so on. What that means is that businesses running Asterisk (think EBay sellers), can publish a Skype ID as well as an ordinary phone number, and Skype users will come in through the standard phone system — CRM and all.” [...]
June 12th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Interesting stuff. Others have done the same, previously, on a smaller (single user) basis and have linked these adapters to Asterisk:
UpLink http://www.nch.com.au/skypetosip/index.html
RSDevs PSGW http://www.rsdevs.com/psgw.shtml
RSDevs has been promising a “multi-user” gateway for a while, but that is probably vaporware. UpLink is a very slick package, but for Windows. I’d be interested to see a more detailed description of how the Pika software actually works – their docs are a bit on the vague side as to the actual functions and components, but that is pretty much the case for everyone’s Skype gateway product, because when you get down to it, they’re all just layers on Skype’s API and a modified sound driver glue on the Windows side.
October 22nd, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Just goes to show the strategy decay that these telco companies are getting into… let the new communications age come – less att, less verizon… GO SKYPE!!!. If anyone wants to learn more about business phone systems, check out:
http://www.businesstelecombuyer.com
They have unbiased advice, news, and they give you competitive price quotes from a bunch of dealers.