Pika Brings Skype to Enterprise Telephony
Source: saunderslog.com
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.Â. 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
