Back in 1986, driving down I-75 as what seemed to be the only car on the road for miles, I could only imagine I would still be making the same drive thirty-five years later!  Spydur Technologies began its life in Voice Processing as Voice Mail Inc (VMI), and started out as the #1 support organization for the Genesis Cindi.  This was in the early days of proprietary $100k+ Voice Mail machines, as we quickly transitioned and saw the benefit of open architecture hardware.  We soon became the #1 support organization for the wildly popular open architecture Avaya Octel, and grew to be authorized distribution for over twenty different manufacturers!  It was only a couple short years of exploding growth before we expanded from our original office building to our new office building at ten times the size, just a mile down the road, and where our operations remain still to this day.

I would like to offer a special thanks to our ever-increasing Spydur Impact Business Partners; we greatly value our continued and growing relationships with you, and are very grateful for both of our continued successes!  Finally to our team and coworkers that has been the foundation of Spydur Technologies, you have my sincerest appreciation for your service over the years; and we look forward to growing with you well into the future!

Gary & Diane Harbeck
Jason & LaDonna Harbeck
Lindsay Adeimy
Debby Bellville
Cheri Ham
Brett Karas
Midiala Rodriguez
Lisett Gonzales
Diana Echezabal
Guillermo Echezabal
Alexander Dounouk
Noel Buranday

Still the world’s leading supplier of voice, store, and forward technology!

Most people are surprised to learn that there is not one, but three different websites based on each aspect of what we do!

www.SpydurPBX.com

The SpydurPBX website is dedicated solely to ‘all that is’ the SpydurPBX, and the incredible things it can do for you! So much of what we do is spending time and teaching you about the wide range of available options, in the hope that you can make better and more informed decisions with regard to your own communications needs. Please visit Why Us? to see that we really do want you to be happy with the SpydurPBX (not just another ‘black box’). Therefore, our goal is to have www.SpydurPBX.com be that single place for you to go and learn more, and determine what makes the most sense for you!

www.SpydurTechnologies.com

Spydur Technologies is ‘who we are’, and details everything we do to help you build a comprehensive solution to service your specific needs. The truth is that very few systems operate in complete isolation, and our skill-set extends to include: SIP Trunking & Hosted Voice, Network Security, Virtualization, and Web Design. We have www.SpydurTechnologies.com here to introduce us and what we can do for you. What you can imagine, we can create! Please visit VoIP / Telecom and Managed IT to learn more, and let us build an integrated system that works to achieve the results you are looking for.

www.VoiceMailInc.com

Voice Mail, Inc (VMI) is the legal name for Spydur Technologies (DBA), and continues to be the greatest source for voice, store, and forward technology… the original term for legacy voice processing. www.VoiceMailInc.com went live way back in 1997 (during the booming age of Mosaic Netscape, the first graphical web browser), and is one of the very oldest websites on the Internet today! The website has grown enormously in content over the years, and currently marks its 6th generation of revamping (which was most recently launched this past January 2020). Please visit 30 Years of History for an account of our early beginnings, and visit Who We Are (Our History) to see how we continue to grow to meet your needs for the future!

Voice Mail has been around for a long, long time… trust us, we know! We have been the world’s largest support organization for “Voice, Store, and Forward” aka “Voice Mail” since 1986 (small fun fact)! And now the Spydur has just gained a few more abilities, and are available to you!

Voice Mail Escalation

Voice Mail Escalation moves new messages out of one mailbox and into another mailbox (after a specified period of time, e.g. after an hour); and, the receiving mailbox owner will be notified (text/email) that there is an Escalated Voice Mail in their mailbox. Voice Mail Escalation will only affect new and unread messages.  Users can listen to a message, save a message, or delete a message to stop the message from escalating.

Persistent Notifications

Persistent Notifications send recurring notification (text/email) that a new message remains unread in a particular mailbox (on a specified schedule, e.g. once every 15 minutes). Messages never leave the user’s mailbox, and these persistent notifications will continue FOREVER. However, users can listen to a message, save a message, or delete a message to stop the persistent notifications.

Definitions

New Message
Brand new voice mail in the original mailbox

Escalated Message
Unread voice mail, escalated to subsequent mailbox

Unread Message
New voice mail not yet listened to

Voice Mail Escalation & Persistent Notifications may be used separately or in conjunction with another, and is specified on a per-mailbox basis.  Everyone can escalate messages and/or receive persistent notifications each in their own way, or not at all.

Shared Mailbox / Group Voice Mail

Allows multiple users to access and monitor a single voice mailbox.  This is done through their telephone’s primary message waiting indicator (aka message waiting light), or through a secondary ‘busy lamp field’ (BLF) programmable key.

Voice Mail Blasting

Also known as Voicemail Distribution, allows a user to record a single message and have that message duplicated into all of the Blast Group Members’ voice mailboxes.

Voice Mail Masquerading

Use custom/departmental greetings to masquerade over a user’s personal voice mailbox.  This means all messages (e.g. sales, support, and personal) can be delivered to a single location, and allows the user to only check one place for all messages!

Legacy Voice Mail Replacement & Migration

Utilize the SpydurUM as a zero-extension Application Server to replace a failing or obsolete legacy voice mail system that is attached to another legacy telephone system!  The SpydurUM will provide all voice mail services with full integration, message waiting, and notification abilities; the same as any traditional voice mail system.
 

Having a zero-extension SpydurUM providing voice mail is very handy indeed, and further allows for extended migration strategies for very large sites!  It is trivial to start adding extensions and hanging telephones off the SpydurUM (essentially converting it into a full-blown SpydurPBX) as it is already integrated with the existing telephone system.  Provide extension-to-extension dialing with the continued legacy voice mail support.  Slowly implement infrastructure, and upgrade individual departments over a long period of time (until the existing telephone system is no longer necessary).

Mitel Dealers have been hit with the realization that Mitel Networks really means when they say “their future is MiCloud.” Mitel has been very frank in telling you to either get on-board or die, and it is high time for You to protect Your business (just like Mitel Networks is protecting their own self-interest). While Mitel has yet to cut the cord, premise-based equipment is no longer their emphasis. Mitel has been sending marketing material directly to Your prospects quoting “on-premises is dead,” and are making it harder for you to sell Mitel products.

You are being urged to become agents reselling their MiCloud service. You do the selling, You do all the work, and Mitel takes both the profit and Your customers! All the while, Mitel is slowly taking Your customer base for their own. It is plain to see that Mitel is willing to bypass you and undermine Your ability to sell and support Your installed base!

This is true of all remote hosted cloud services, stop building their cloud!

Spydur does all the things that Mitel simply “does not do” or “does not do well” at a lower cost, and keeps you in complete control! We provide an easy and seamless way for Your company to maintain Your existing customers using Your existing business plan. We offer an actual migration path to current technology using Mitel telephones and switches, and NOT a wholesale change! “We help Mitel Dealers sell more Mitel!”

Spydur is supplied by interconnect companies as an outright purchase, an expensed lease, or as a dealer direct hosted solution (premise-based or colocated). With Spydur, you only pay for what you want… we will not nickel and dime you! Spydur does NOT require any kind of software assurance costs that reduces Your maintenance revenue. If we can add anything to the Spydur at no cost to us, then you will directly see the benefits of our work at no cost to you! We want Your Company to be successful and profitable: When You do well, we do well.

You have spent a career building Your Company, finding Your customers, and then supporting Your installed base. Mitel Networks has made it much harder for you to sell Mitel by subjugating you to selling their MiCloud. Do you want to become a sales agent building Mitel Network’s business, or do you want to continue to build Your own business by selling and supporting Your own base?

Don’t give up Your customers to another company

We at Spydur Technologies want to make ourselves even more accessible to you with a wider Social Media presence.  Our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts will help us better connect, serve, and communicate with you and our community.  I would like to take this opportunity to describe what you can expect from our Social Media presence.

	Our SpydurBlog will continue to be used to explain specific subjects with great detail.  Topics might include new features coming to the Spydur, or fresh Sales Perspectives to help you be more effective with your own customers.  The information we provide is intended to enlighten and give you a deeper understanding on the given topic.
	Twitter is one of our new avenues on Social Media.  Our tweets will primarily be quick short notifications and updates (given that we only have 140 characters).  These announcements may ‘shout out’ new enhancements to the Spydur, or simply point you to valuable information or news in the industry.
	LinkedIn is another new Social Media account in our new drive.  Its purpose is to inform you on specific news and events with Spydur Technologies itself.  This will also help us connect with you and other companies in our industry to discover how we might be able to help you more!
	Facebook is our third new Social Media account where we aim to give you a wide range of posts, announcements, and links to various pictures and product media along with short descriptions.  We hope to engage with you in all areas, from new product introductions to upcoming exhibitions and conventions.
	The RSS News feed will continue to guide you towards our Product and Industry News articles.  The purpose is to keep you up to date with new material and happenings with Spydur itself, and provides a quick and easy solution that you can subscribe to find out about all the new things coming your way!

Our new wider Social Media Presence aims to serve you in more ways than ever before.  We are working diligently through these new avenues to give you the level of access that we mutually desire.  You and I are real people, and you mean a lot to us.   We look forward to building this beneficial partnership with you, together over the long term.  So Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter, and Connect with us on LinkedIn; and be a part of something new!


Facebook @ spydur.technologies
LinkedIn @ spydur-technologies
Twitter @ SpydurTech

1.) Poor Reliability & Inconsistent Voice Quality

This is because there are at least twice as many points of failure as with onsite equipment.  While the Remote Hosted Services argue they have superior reliability with redundant servers and multiple nodes for failover, the truth is they are reselling service themselves and have to pump it all back out again to their own provider.  Further compounding the issue, are the economics of a Remote Hosted Service which dictates that they bulk as much traffic on as little bandwidth as possible.  Even when all systems are working in concert, they may still be providing poor voice quality if there are any issues with any of the connections.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The problems are so prevalent that many customers revert to their old telephone systems – even after investing in new internal cabling, routers, switches, battery backup, and telephones – because they are accustomed to the reliability of their old systems.  Save their investment and rest their fears by installing a Spydur with traditional analog trunks or a PRI instead!

2.) Remote Hosted Service makes you pay FOREVER!

Whether Purchased, Expensed Lease, or Managed Service; an on-premise UCS is a fraction of the cost for a Remote “Rental” Hosted Service!  To prove this: assume that the Customer is going to be in business for at least 10 years and wants service for at least that period.  Take the price of any of the three primary ways of acquiring a communications system, and amortize how much it costs on a monthly basis.  This will give you the monthly equipment expense, but to be fair you also need to add in the “trunks” needed to run your business (with an on-premise solution, you get to choose your own carriers).

If you know your customer’s usage, a fairly accurate way to price a carrier is at 2 cents per minute. If you do not know your customer’s monthly connect time, simply take the number of trunks they need and multiply it by $10 per trunk monthly.

Just do the math, and you will clearly see how “basic service” with Remote Hosted is 2~4 times the cost!  Add the amortized equipment investment and the monthly SIP trunk expense together and that is your customer’s monthly expense for an onsite enterprise grade UCS.  For Remote “Rental” Service, take the monthly cost for each extension (dial tone), and multiply it by 120 months to see the difference.

3.) General Lack of Features & Very Limited Services

We’ve all heard it before… “All I need is basic telephone service” …but customers don’t understand just how very basic, basic can get!  Unless they can be happy with dial-tone, a simple greeting/menu, and ring group… there is no such thing as basic telephone service.  When a customer says “I need ________”, you already know they won’t be happy unless they get an actual system with some power and flexibility to it (ACD, Reporting, Call Logging, Managed Conferences, Exchange Integration, Third-Party CRM, etc).  The reason for their shortcomings are obvious: all customers are being serviced by the same hosted system, and their limited feature set absolutely must have consistency and uniformity across all users.  Unfortunately, businesses are not cookie-cutter, and what happens to be considered basic by one customer is not basic to any other business!

So who is Remote Hosted Service actually good for?

Remote Hosted Service is viable for only three types of Customers:

Very Small Offices
One, two, and three man offices (not associated with a larger corporation) typically only need the most basic of services, and may be satisfied by a remoted hosted “basic” service.  These businesses are just looking for dial tone, and often rely more on their cell phones to run their businesses.  You’re really not going to save very small individual offices, and they simply don’t need an enterprise-grade system.

Short-Term Customers
“Hi, my name is Gary and I’m running for political office.  I need a system until next November.  Can you help me?”  Gary is not going to need the telephone system after November.  He either didn’t win the election, or doesn’t need the system anymore because he got elected (and his publicly funded communications system is being paid by the taxpayers).

Brand-New Businesses
The customer who needs a communications system to start a business, or to stay operational but has no money.  These customers have no company history, and often have a very hard time getting financing.  While you should certainly be careful, you by no means need to avoid these customers if done properly.

Whenever you find a Customer that is currently using a Remote Hosted Service, make sure that you give them your business card and call on them periodically.  Make sure that you know when their service agreement is coming due.  It will be easy for you to convert the customer at that time and they will love you for it!

Qualify your customer by asking them if they want to own, expense, or have a managed service.  Give the customer an idea up front about the type of capital expenditure a purchase will be.  When a purchase price is going to be an issue, quote as an expensed lease with a $1 buyout at the end.  Make sure they know the monthly expense ends after the 36th or 60th month; whereas payments never end with a Remote (Rental) Hosted Service, and they need to know that!

If you have an experience you’d like to convey, let us hear from you!

1.) What quality network connections do you have?
2.) Are you paying for more service than you need?
3.) What condition is your current system in?
4.) How do you troubleshoot problems?
5.) Who is accessing your system?

…the answers we hear most often are that of uncertainty or faint notions of seemingly good or bad, with nothing really to point at.  The truth is, that your telecommunications and network services should not be a mystery.  No matter if you are making a business decision which affects recurring expenses, or determining why it is your services are faltering… you need to have the information available in order to make a wise and informed course of action.

The Spydur provides the most information possible, across all aspects of your telecommunications and networking services

1.) What quality network connections do you have?

The Spydur continuously measures the network latency with an unlimited number of hosts, whether internal or external to your network, and charts the results on a timeline basis.  Not only will you see the latency across these hosts, but also the deviation or jitter from it.  You will further be able to determine if a problem resides with a specific host, or with your provider, as the results overlay on combined graphs.

2.) Are you paying for more service than you need?

The Spydur continuously measures the amount of throughput you are actually using from an unlimited number of access points, whether at your own site or a remote office, and charts the results on a timeline basis.  Not only will you see what you are using, but if your provider(s) are delivering what is being promised.  Many times, we see customers paying for significantly more service than what is actually needed, and this can immediately be turned around into monthly savings!

3.) What condition is your current system in?

The Spydur continuously measures the system’s health across all metrics, and charts the results on a timeline basis (e.g. utilization, activity, temperature, voltages, etc.).  This includes all components at the hardware level, and all services at the software level.  This helps to identify any discrepancies, and provides a course of action for failing hardware or environmental conditions.

4.) How do you troubleshoot problems?

These charted timelines are an extraordinary and valuable resource, but sometimes you may want to manually run any number of tests to further pinpoint or confirm issues.  You may also need to process and view special, real-time debug information from a variety of other devices (e.g. routers, switches, telephones, etc.).  The Spydur makes all of this possible, as you can easily perform these tests, and accept diagnostic information for other devices on your network too!

5.) Who is accessing your system?

Sometimes the hardest issues to pinpoint have nothing to do with your network or the system itself (hardware/software), but rather users trying to do something they are “not supposed to do.”  The Spydur logs absolutely everything on a timeline basis, and will help pinpoint oddities and errors as caused by users themselves.

The next time someone says:

“I had a problem yesterday at 3 o’clock, but we are good now… can you tell me what happened yesterday at 3 o’clock?”

…you will know exactly where to look, and what to say!!!

The Spydur comes as either a rackmount, tower, or wallmount… internally, whenever a wallmount order is placed, we refer to the build process as “screwing up a board”.  The efforts to “screw up a board” goes well beyond any of our competition, because we want the physical installation to be significantly easier for you!

We have been offering “screwed up boards” (heh) since the very first SpydurCore & SpydurByte were introduced, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. We continue to offer the wallmounted board at a loss (costing much more in time and materials) so that you don’t have to, because it not only makes your life easier but we know it can really help sell a system too!

Internally, whenever a wallmount order is placed, we refer to the build process as “screwing up a board”.

“Screwing up” a Spydur Wallmount takes a good bit of time, precise planning, and careful eyes to have it all come together just right. As every board is unique (different sites need different components), each comes with its own set of challenges.

Beginning the process, once we know what the customer wants, is to plan out where all the devices belong on the board. The devices maintain proper distances and are normally pointed toward the right of the board to ensure the cables have a natural flow. We make sure everything is mounted securely to prevent any damage, all cabling is color coded and stapled, and devices remain easily accessible with a single CAM screw locking them in.

A Spydur Wallmount is shipped with a variety of wood, steel, and masonry screws for different types of walls.  All that should be required is to 1.) screw the board on your wall, 2.) connect a single power connection, and 3.) connect a single network connection along with any lines you may have coming in.

There are good reasons why people choose to get a wallmounted Spydur, and we want to help make your install as easy as possible.  I hope this will give you a good overview of what it means to “screw up” a board, and can appreciate the effort behind the build.  Thank you for reading through and have a great day!

Want to use those Cisco telephones?  No problem! … the sales guys really like comparing the bottom line to show the substantial cost savings without any exorbitant maintenance contracts, because it makes them feel good by getting those potential customers to say wow!  Those decision makers will now have the great difficulty of deciding where best to utilize that very big wad of cash (a very good problem indeed).

Similarly, us operations guys really like clearing out those IP Office’s and Call Managers, replacing an entire rack full of equipment with a single 1U chassis, because it makes us feel good by getting those new customers’ IT people to say wow!  You can very easily see the realization come over their faces as they behold the new-found space, and watch as the multitude of devices are removed (no longer to be managed on their network).

I wish I had a dollar every time I heard…
“look, you can see the floor now!” – or – “wow, is that it?!?!?”

Hardware periodically leaps ahead in both capacity and performance, and allows for smaller form factors, lower electricity bills, lower temperatures, and significantly MORE performance!  Over the years: motherboards have miniaturized, memory has gotten cheap, hard drives got larger (ridiculously large for telephony applications), and multi-core processors were introduced (a truly novel concept).

About a year ago, solid state drives were made standard in all SpydurCore’s & SpydurBytes, and while they continue to have the same great reliability as their mechanical counterparts, they operate at much lower temperatures, have no moving parts (can be bumped), and have significantly higher performance (which cannot be understated).

As for today, the standard processors used in the SpydurCore & SpydurByte are leaping ahead again with some very advanced and updated System-on-Chip (SoC) designs featuring quad cores at a 50% speed increase via 33% faster clock rate, with an even more advanced instruction set (i.e. out-of-order processing).

So… what to do with all that extra processing power? MWUHAAAAaaaaaaaa!

Once the purvue of only the powerful SpydurPBX, the lines are blurring as the feature set of the SpydurByte is expanding to now include: Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) and Collaboration, integrated Web-MeetMe Management Controls, Three new Advanced Reporting Modules, Named Greeting Libraries, and several other enhancements along the way… all using the same ultra-small form factor!  Partners will find an updated Product Matrix on the Partner Site, and be sure to ask a sales engineer for more information today!!!

The Spydur exists to help connect you and your business with the people you serve, and we created this blog to connect with you! We hope this outlet will help relate to you on a more personal level and will be a bit more relaxed. While most of the articles will relate to the Spydur itself, we will also be taking some time to discuss the latest developments, challenges, and opportunities we see within the communications industry as a whole. Our perceptions influence our design choices and business decisions alike, and we want you to know how and why! We look forward to sharing with you, and trust you will appreciate and find this blog helpful.