ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612030051
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
ANSWERING THE telephone without knowing who's on the other end of the line is like opening your front door to someone wearing a bag over his head, said Victoria Windsor, president of Security Products InterNational Inc. of Roanoke.
But with the advent of Caller ID telephone services, there's no longer the need to answer a call with a blindfold on, she said.
Windsor, who moved her small computer software and hardware development company from Colorado to the Roanoke Valley last year, is hoping to cash in on a growing demand for the kind of information that Caller ID systems can provide.
She's aiming her product at law enforcement agencies and small businesses.
Windsor's company, which occupies half of a small office building on Virginia 419 in Southwest Roanoke County, is one of at least two companies in Southwest Virginia that are mining the Caller ID market. Another is Mountain Systems Inc. of Grundy, a developer for Caller ID software for both residential and business customers.
Mountain Systems' software products support the hardware of a variety of multiple-line Caller ID equipment makers, including Rochelle Communications of Austin, Texas. Bell Canada has recently agreed to sell a package of Mountain Systems' software and Rochelle's Caller ID box at 160 retail phone centers in Canada, according to Edward Dixon, Mountain Systems' president.
Dixon, who holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Virginia, worked as a software engineer and manager for defense contractor TRW for 20 years. He returned from Northern Virginia with his wife, Tina, to their Buchanan County hometown three years ago to start Mountain Systems.
"One of the advantages of the telephone is that it's much easier to be a software developer anywhere," Dixon said. Because computerized information can be carried over phone lines, a company like Dixon's isn't tied to a large metropolitan area.
Caller ID as a consumer phone service has been around since the late 1980s, but the Federal Communications Commission ordered phone companies nationwide to offer it last Dec. 1. In implementing its Caller ID rules, the FCC found that Caller ID is in the public interest and said its potential benefits, including efficiency and productivity gains and employment opportunities, would only be possible if phone companies make caller information available.
In the past most Caller ID users have been homeowners. Businesses are beginning to discover its uses for managing calls and employee time. Companies are finding they can improve customer service by tying Caller ID to customer records kept in computer systems.
The introduction of digital switching equipment in telephone company offices made it possible for phone companies to offer Caller ID services. If a business wants to use the technology, it must both subscribe to Caller ID with the phone company and obtain software and Caller ID equipment from vendors such as Security Products or Mountain Systems.
In Roanoke, Bell Atlantic charges a residential customer $6.50 a month for basic Caller ID service, which just gives a caller's number, and $7.50 for a version which gives both a caller's name and number. Business customers pay $8.50 monthly for Caller ID and $9.50 for the upgraded Caller ID Deluxe. They pay the same for each additional line but there is a discount for businesses with their own in-house switching equipment.
The growth potential for Caller ID companies appears enormous. Nationwide, there are 100 million phone lines but only 15 million Caller ID subscribers, said Tom Russell of SNI Innovations, a Boston-based maker of Caller ID equipment. Paul Miller, a Bell Atlantic spokesman, said his company had about 1 million Caller ID subscribers in June 1995 and by this past June 1 1 million more customers had subscribed to the service.
Security Products began offering its Caller ID equipment and software product for sale just this year. A Lynchburg company makes the company's circuit boards and KelTech Inc., a Roanoke electronics manufacturer, assembles the Caller ID hardware, Windsor said.
Both Windsor and company Vice President Ronald Hartley have many years in the telephone business, both worked for AT&T and both left that company in 1991. They had discussed the idea for a Caller ID product after the service was introduced in the late 1980s, Hartley said. They wound up in Roanoke because of the growing number of telecommunications companies locating in Virginia, Windsor said.
The company's Identification Data Retrieval System 2001 can handle eight lines simultaneously and the Caller ID box can be stacked with others to manage 64 lines or more, according to company literature. Among the system's features are: keeping historical records of conversations, tracking time spent on line, printing reports and color graphics, self testing and tracking both in-bound and out-bound calls.
Among the benefits businesses will realize from use of her company's product are improved customer service and productivity and, for businesses such as banks, news organizations, airlines and abortion clinics, improved security, Windsor said.
Her product can help a business or police department improve its staffing by telling it when it is the busiest or help a law office keep up with its billable hours, Windsor said. The eight-line box and accompanying software costs $2,000, she said.
Security Products also is working on voice recognition software both for security applications and for use in the health care field, Windsor said. The company is working with a hospital in Denver on the software for a voice-controlled computer mouse for paralyzed people, she said. The company's Voice Print technology, which will be incorporated into its newest Caller ID software, can verify a person's identity to an accuracy of 1 in 1 million, she said.
Bob Martinet - one of the founders of FiberCom, a Roanoke fiber-optic electronics maker now owned by Litton Industries - is working as a consultant for Security Products. He described his job as helping the company raise money to put together a sales force and promote its products.
"It's definitely a product where the window of opportunity has opened up in the past year," he said of the company's Caller ID software.
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Although last year's federal order required telephone companies to pass along a caller's number to Caller ID subscribers, the service is still not available in some areas where phone companies lack the technology to provide it. In Grundy, for instance, Mountain Systems may be developing cutting-edge Caller ID software, but can't use it on their own phone system because GTE, the local phone company, can't offer the service.
Mountain Systems, Dixon said, has customers in all 50 states and a dozen foreign countries. The company's Call Audit software was named the product of the year by Computer Telephony magazine in its December 1995 issue. The magazine recognized the company for filling a void in Caller ID products for two- to four-line Caller ID users.
Mountain Systems also offers a multiline software that can accommodate two to 129 lines and audit outgoing as well as incoming phone calls. Its latest offering is a call-routing software that will direct incoming calls to one or more workstations in an office, depending on who's calling in.
As an example of the latter technology, Dixon used a law office where the system could be set up to route calls from individual clients to the desks of the lawyers who handle them.
The software also can be used to ease the process of making outbound calls or for paging someone away from the home or office. A real-estate company in the Atlanta area advertised in the paper and included coded numbers that people could call to hear more information about specific homes. The real-estate company's agents could use Mountain Systems' software to see which callers had listened to which recordings the longest and call them back to pursue sales, Dixon said.
A small manufacturing shop uses a feature in the software that ties the Caller ID to a public address system and announces incoming calls from customers in the real voices of shop employees who normally handle those customers, Dixon said.
Pizza delivery businesses and restaurants use the software. By instantly calling up information on a caller from a customer database, the maitre'd in a restaurant can determine such things as how big a spender a customer is or what a customer's food preferences are and respond to the call in the most favorable way, Dixon said.
His company's software can also be used to block unwanted calls, Dixon said. A Pennsylvania couple, whose daughter was receiving obscene phone calls, configured their software to hang up the phone on anyone calling from a phone that couldn't be identified. And a Tennessee mail-order company selling medical supplies that was forbidden by law from selling in Canada used Caller ID to block all calls from Canadian area codes.
His company gets ideas for many of the features included in its software from customers, Dixon said. "What we tried to do is provide all possible options of what people felt was important to them," he said.
Mountain Systems' software supports all versions of Microsoft Windows software. The software contains its own database or can be linked to commercial customer contact management software or to CD-ROM databases.
Dixon said the company's basic software, which comes in three floppy diskettes, sells for $50. The company also sells the Caller ID equipment of a couple of manufacturers. The cost for software and hardware together will run from $100 to $150 per workstation, he said.
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Both Mountain Systems' and Security Products' technology allow businesses to track not only incoming but also outgoing calls. However, both Dixon and Windsor discount the notion that tracking outgoing calls violates the privacy of a business' employees.
The reality for businesses is that they have telephones they provide employees and the bills come back to them, Dixon said. Businesses have made up the cost of installing the Caller ID equipment in the first month through a savings in long-distance charges by employees, Dixon said.
Privacy concerns have held up availability of Caller ID in California, where the public service commission wants all phone numbers blocked to Caller ID users unless phone customers ask that their numbers be unblocked.
The federal rules provide that all numbers be available to Caller ID users but allow callers to block their identity at no charge by dialing *67 before placing a call. The rules also allow phone customers to ask phone companies to permanently block their identities if state rules allow it.
California lost a court challenge to the FCC rule but the matter may wind up in Congress' lap next year, predicted Evan Hendricks, editor of the Privacy Times, a Washington newsletter.
Many people who pay for unlisted phone numbers don't know that their numbers will show up on the screens of Caller ID users unless they specifically asked that the phone company keep their information private, Hendricks said. "Bell Atlantic has done a lousy job in educating people about their rights to block out Caller ID," he said.
The groups worried about Caller ID are battered women's shelters, counselors, physicians and psychiatrists, Hendricks said. Some have raised concerns about the loss of anonymity for people who call crisis centers for such things as suicide, AIDS and alcoholism.
For law enforcement, Caller ID can "cut both ways," Hendricks said. In one instance, drug dealers used Caller ID to make sure the calls they were getting weren't from the police, he said.
People also aren't generally aware that when they call an 800 or 900 phone number the owner of the number gets information about the caller from the phone company and there is currently no technology available to block that from happening, Hendricks said.
The debate over Caller ID is very live, he said.
For Windsor, however, security questions are outweighed by concerns over the accuracy of information a person receives over the phone and the security of information a person gives out.
LENGTH: Long : 202 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN Staff. Victoria Windsor is president ofby CNBSecurity Products InterNational Inc. of Roanoke. The company's
Identification Data Retrieval System 2001 can handle eight lines
simultaneously, and the Caller ID box can be stacked with others to
manage 64 lines or more. color.