Author: James Chapman

PIKA is Doing a Market Survey to Help Plan its Product Roadmap

Posted by | Oct 5, 2009 | , , |

The company is asking for five minutes of your time to help them with the future developments of the PIKA WARP appliance and is rewarding one in five participants (who wish to enter the draw) an IPOD Nano. The company is interested in things like the region where you are located, what type of business you are in, your role, your familiarity with the WARP appliance, Asterisk Open Source Software and others. As the survey runs the gamut of options a potential product could offer, the survey has the potential to really help PIKA with building a customer driven appliance that will be very useful to its consumers. Let’s hope the response helps them with meeting the markets expectations. Way to go PIKA for doing your research and asking! Click here to access the...

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Why 3CX? Interview with Nick Galea, the CEO of 3CX

Posted by | Sep 30, 2009 | , , , |

This past week, VoIPon had a chance to interview 3CX’s CEO, Nick Galea to get answers to some of the questions which might cross the minds of business owners as they look to replace their traditional PBX with one of the many options available to them in next generation phone systems. We asked Nick to elaborate on his answers in this podcast, but here is the summary. VoIPon: Why should someone choose 3CX based system over the dominant open source software Asterisk? Nick Galea (NG): 3CX should be the system of choice for any company running a Windows network and servers. Asterisk is a Linux solution. It requires Linux knowledge and quite a lot of it too. If you are not familiar with Linux, then you will need to do a lot of training JUST to run a phone system. Choosing a Linux distribution with Asterisk pre-installed will not shield you from this either. A network administrator will: have to understand how the Linux distribution works, be able to apply security updates (which is critical), connect it to the Windows network, learn how to integrate it with Windows server applications, and learn how to monitor it. This will require a lot of time and technical support. If you factor in the cost of technical support, the total cost of an Asterisk-based system is much higher than that of a...

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New Sangoma Hardware Coming & Call Progress Analysis @ Call Center Expo ’09

Posted by | Sep 29, 2009 | , , |

Frederic Dickey, Sangoma’s Product Manager took the time to chat with VoIPon’s Sales Manager, Alexis Argent, this past week at Call Center Expo in Birmingham, UK. The show appeared to be a success for Sangoma and they told us they were happy to attend. “There are some interesting companies, including high-end users in the call center space, but also a lot of really good open source solutions based on open source projects”, according to Frederic Dickey. The conversation quickly moved to a discussion of Call Progress Analysis, which was the main reason Sangoma attended the show. “Our NetBorder Call Analyzer product does call progress analysis for outbound call centers,” Dickey said.  “Here in the UK, OfCom, the regulatory body has very stringent certifications on outbound dialers, and part of it affects the quality of call progress analysis.” The Sangoma product is interesting and can really help call centers using outbound dialers in the UK. It’s worth checking out. Sangoma has a white paper talking about this product here and it’s worth a read. In terms of more traditional Sangoma products, we also learned that as a follow up to the B600 card the company released this past spring, (a combination single slot 4-port FXO and 1-Port FXS interface), Sangoma has a single T1 with an FXS slot on single interface in its beta phase and is looking for testers. Dickey...

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Foncordiax IP PBX ‘plug and Go’ System

Posted by | Sep 28, 2009 | , , |

The Foncordiax IP PBX telephone switchboard just released a new ‘plug and Go’ system. This means that a Foncordiax system can be taken off the shelf, unpacked, plugged in, switched on and making and receiving calls in minutes and only with minimal experience. The company explains in a recent newsletter, “If you can plug a computer into a network, you’ve got enough experience!” The company tells us that not only are the new Foncordiax Control Units easy to install and set up, but they come with the Foncordiax PBX software, which provides “everything a business will ever need from its phone system” including voice mail and music on hold to call forwarding, conferencing and call recording. The Foncordiax Control unit has been completely re-engineered and the range now comprises just three units; ‘SoHo’ (Ideal small/remote office system), ‘Office’ which can connect to any existing lines and handle over 120 concurrent calls and ‘Corporate’ with built in redundancy and components to suit specific businesses. This past June, Foniatec also announced that Sangoma’s premium voice cards now power all telephony interfaces for Foncordiax PBX appliances. This combination should prove to be an interesting solution for businesses in search of an easy-to-use...

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