PIKA is an industry leader in voice processing technology that is functionally rich and built on a high performance, extremely flexible architecture. The company has strong skills in VoIP, digital signal processing (DSP), analog and digital telephone line hardware interfaces, global telecom protocols, FAX, and multi-platform real-time software development. PIKA holds patents related to communications and host media processing architectures.
Solutions Market Knowledge. PIKA’s market knowledge spans more than 20 years in the solutions areas including custom VoIP gateways, voice services (Interactive Voice Response), custom/specialized PC-PBXs, audio logging/recording, and FAX.
- PIKA is the underlying technology provider to the majority of application and service providers in the $2B USD federal and state based Prison Telephone Systems market.
- PIKA is also the majority provider of enabling technology to the Deaf Relay Services market in the USA.
- PIKA provides a significant proportion of technology to the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) market in Europe and the Middle East.
- PIKA provides the majority of audio logging enabling technology in the Middle East.
Management / Financial Management. The executive team possesses in-depth market knowledge, strong technology development experience and excellent financial prowess. Members of the team are accountable and self-reliant, ensuring that business is conducted efficiently and driven strategically. To learn more about our leaders, please visit our Leadership Team page.
Customer Intimacy. In a marketplace dominated by three very large competitors, PIKA is required to focus product development and marketing/sales efforts on specific vertical segments of the market, rather than trying to meet all the needs of the entire horizontal market. In carving its niche, PIKA’s value proposition to prospects in the selected segments must clearly differentiate it from these competitors. Although our technology, products and quality are all good, we have chosen a focus on building unusually strong, meaningful customer relationships as our key differentiator. Many of the strategies, processes and procedures that we have developed and implemented over the past four years have been in support of this company-wide initiative. Our efforts in this area include the following:
- Maintaining direct commercial and technical support relationships with our customers
- Enhancing inventory planning and product configuration procedures to allow for very short product lead times
- Performing extensive pre-shipment product testing procedures to ensure out-of-box quality each and every time
- Focusing on every customer touch-point throughout the company to be sure that outcome of every customer interaction is positive
- Providing the best customer technical support in the industry
Technical Competencies
PIKA's enabling technologies are based on expertise in four areas critical to success in the Voice 2.0marketplace:
1. PSTN Telecom
We design telephony cards which connect to the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network and support analog (phone and trunk) and digital (T1/E1) line interfaces. Our cards provide a range of popular protocols (loop start, ISDN, CAS), card capacities (4 lines to 240 lines per card), and computing form factors (PCI, PCIexpress, and cPCI).
2. VoIP Telecom
As Voice over IP gradually displaces the traditional PSTN network, we have developed the required building blocks for voice transmission (RTP, G.711, G.729) and signalling (SIP), enabling our customers to develop their applications to use either PSTN telecom or VoIP telecom or both.
3. Real-Time Voice Processing
We know voice processing and the performance (capacity, robustness, latency) it requires. We have built our own real-time microkernel which can run on either digital signal processors (DSP) or standard host processors (Intel, AMD). This microkernel is the base on which we develop (and our customers run) a powerful set of voice processing functions, ranging from relatively simply ones like switching and tone detection to more complex ones like conferencing and echo cancellation. This is rocket science.
4. Software Development Kits
PIKA's software development kit (SDK) provides customers with a programming interface to our telephony network interfaces (PSTN or VoIP) and voice processing functionality. Customers can develop their applications using either a low level API (most flexible) or high level API (simplest), in either Windows or Linux operating system. We provide sample code, plug-ins for popular platforms (Envox, Asterisk, Skype), and license some of our code as open source.
The PIKA SDK allows customers to get started quickly and to easily grow their systems with a minimum of development effort.
At the heart of the Company’s enabling technologies is a flexible architecture based on concepts such as scalability, resource sharing and modularity. This architecture (known as "AllOnBoard" for our DSP based voice processing and "AllOnHost" for our host based voice processing) enables our customers to build revolutionary applications that bridge the underlying technologies in an evolutionary way.