Today, as I'm blogging from the ITEXPO press room I learned that the PIKA WARP Appliance has been adopted by Schmooze (aka the Yiddish Asterisk 
). If you recall, I reviewed the PIKA WARP Appliance last week. The WARP Appliance can run Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, and now Schmooze.
Schmooze Communications will be using PIKA WARP the Appliance as the hardware component in a new line of its PBXact business telephone systems.
Schmooze president Tony Lewis and his development team are major contributors to FreePBX, one of the top graphical user interface (GUI) applications in use today that provides pre-programmed functionality for users wanting to ease the configuration of the Asterisk open-source platform. While there are a number of GUIs on the market, FreePBX has emerged as one of the industry standards that, when combined with PIKA WARP the Appliance, provides developers with a superior solution for cost-effective, scaleable and customizable business phone systems. Schmooze Communications sees compatibility between the WARP appliance and FreePBX to be a boon to both the open-source development community as a whole and to Schmooze specifically. To this end, Schmooze collaborated with PIKA Technologies and the FreePBX project to integrate the necessary software components on the WARP platform in order to support FreePBX
"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's plan to integrate the PIKA Warp platform into its product line comes on the heels of recent unique additions to Schmooze's other product lines, such as the Schmooze Magic Button, a speech recognition platform. With the Magic Button, your voice can now control any function on a phone normally performed by a complicated combination of key presses and star codes. From making, routing and forwarding calls, to conferencing in a co-worker or being notified by an automated attendant when a co-worker returns to the office, the Magic Button allows users to control their entire communications experience with their voice. Schmooze is also a market leader in the integration of communications enhancing phone handset applications, such as visual voicemail, Microsoft Exchange integration, and user presence.
