Spodar Group

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO at an email service provider. We have high-end telecoms using our services to power their email. Our email is hosted in our data centers here in California. We built our own email application which not many people do, and we have about 3 million users on that platform. Although email is becoming a commodity, there aren’t a lot of companies who power email, and we’re one of those few.

What challenge were you trying to address with Spodar Group?

One of the challenges that we wanted Spodar Group to engage with us was our mail transfer agent (MTA), particularly the internet message format (IMF) protocol. We had some issues with internal developers who could not make proper optimizations to the IMF, which was the primary protocol that people used to connect to an email server, whether it was on their phone or through Outlook.

There was a specific issue with Outlook that was affecting the majority of our customers, and sometimes when iPhones updated, issues would arise all of a sudden. We reached out to Spodar Group because they had prior experience at dealing with MTA, so we worked with them to address those challenges and make a plan to fix those issues.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked on several projects and then moved on to maintenance. The projects we were working on were based on an existing application that runs on a cloud-based service provider. That includes internet message access protocol (IMAP), post office protocol (POP), and delivery engines that receive and process about 300 million emails a day.

Spodar Group worked on optimizing every protocol within our environments to refactor the code so it performed better, had fewer issues, and was more sustainable. They went through the code, identified the root of the issue, fixed it, and tested it in a staging environment. That was the primary project that we engaged with them.

Once they optimized and made fixes to the platform, they released the code to production and to millions of active users, so they also worked at doing the releases. They ensured that those releases were adequately QA’ed and running smoothly once they were promoted to production.

What is the team composition?

We had two main people working as developers and project managers. They were assessing the project and doing the work themselves.

How did you come to work with Spodar Group?

There’s not a lot of people that do this kind of development work. We did some research, and we found them online. We reached out to them and had them work on small projects. Their work was great, so we moved forward with bigger projects.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent at least $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in June 2020. There were three main projects that took us about four months. We have ongoing maintenance operations.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We based the success on the customer feedback and the support tickets. This was simple because we knew we had an existing issue. Some bad developers can create bigger problems with their fixes, but not Spodar Group — they were in line with what they needed to do. We had support tickets open for the issues. Once they promoted a lot of these fixes, all those tickets were closed and never opened again, The customers were happy!

How did Spodar Group perform from a project management standpoint?

Overall, the communication was amazing. Their availability was on point, as they were there for us 24/7. Since we were in a mission-critical environment, that was good. We had our largest migration on a weekend, and they were there to assist, guide us, and troubleshoot whatever we needed. They used email, Skype, and WhatsApp as different channels of communication. 

We used Trello to reflect all the hours and tasks of the project. My team members and I were following what they did through the platform, and they did a good job documenting everything as they went through it. They were good at staying on budget and on time.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re amazing at troubleshooting and refactoring code. They can go through code, analyze it, identify issues, and take it from there. As time goes by, we need to continuously update, optimize, and upgrade our code — it’s part of our world. Spodar Group is able to do that pretty quickly.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We didn’t have a primary project manager, which is desirable for situations like this. We were able to get through it because they worked with us and we worked with them.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be clear and concise. Have proper documentation on any projects that you engage the company to work on. However, even if you don’t have the right documentation, Spodar Group is able to go through the code, analyze it, and understand it in order to take it to the next level.