But the portal was nearly grounded last year.

E-gatematrix found out the hard way that the online ordering application on the portal didn't have the capacity to handle large orders. Big food orders for in-flight meals--each with hundreds of ingredients--took more than 10 minutes to process and sometimes didn't go through at all. An airline or supplier could select orders from e-gatematrix's online catalogs with no problem, but when it came time to submit the final order, the user would have to endure the excruciatingly slow back-end processing phase or find that the order didn't execute.

"It red-lined all the database servers," says Charles Rice, CIO of e-gatematrix. "Customers would get frustrated and cancel their orders or sometimes resubmit them, creating duplicate orders in the system."

The problem was that the company's ordering software, i2 Technologies' TradeMatrix, was written for smaller orders, not ones with as many as 300 line items. If an airline ordered a single line item of 100 bags of oranges, the order went through without a hitch, Rice says. So e-gatematrix replaced the application with RightWorks, which i2 purchased last year. That application can better support the infrequent but crucial 300-line orders.

E-gatematrix configured the new ordering application to work asynchronously so the actual back-end transaction takes place behind the scenes rather than requiring the user to await confirmation of his or her order, says Kevin Marsh, director of technology integration for e-gatematrix. It also can handle more transaction volume and users so the database and application servers don't get overloaded anymore.

E-gatematrix wouldn't reveal how much it spent to make the transition. Getting RightWorks up and running took about two months and didn't require any integration with most suppliers, thanks to a browser interface that helps them manage orders. Still, e-gatematrix did have to integrate with some big suppliers such as Sage Enterprises to automate the order workflow, using translation software from webMethods. Sage supplies food, trays and utensils for flights.

E-gatematrix offers flight-scheduling tools on the portal that let an airline forecast how many refreshment carts, meals, plates, headsets and sodas it will need for a particular 747 trans-Atlantic flight. This is a large undertaking for Delta, which operates more than 2,000 flights each day. Some 40,000 of these products are used for in-flight services on a typical 747 trans-Atlantic flight.

The online tools replace the old 9-inch-thick catering manuals Delta had previously sent to its catering companies and suppliers. Updating the old manuals meant faxing out or mailing changes, and the caterer was responsible for manually pulling old pages and inserting new ones.

"Out of multiple Delta systems, we can produce useful information that aggregates their information," says Shawn Rouse, director of business development for e-gatematrix. "We can take a flight schedule and, based on airline-defined rules, apply the services to that flight schedule so that when you book a ticket for a four-hour flight, you get a full meal and a movie. Our systems communicate those requirements to the supply chain."

E-gatematrix initially had to write separate interfaces between its applications and many of the airlines' and suppliers' systems--the company developed about 60 of these custom interfaces, Rice says. E-gatematrix's main business-to-business integration tool thus far has been its own Java-based homegrown tool, the Interface Staging Environment, or ISE. E-gatematrix developers use the code to build interfaces between airlines, suppliers and the portal site, including the necessary encryption and translation. But e-gatematrix's new strategy is to use webMethods' integration platform instead of ISE for integrating with its customers' applications. "We are converting all custom-integration code to webMethods and phasing out ISE," Rice says, because webMethods' software is a popular integration platform and therefore a better long-term strategy than the company's homegrown one.

With Delta, e-gatematrix used a combination of ISE and XML to integrate Delta's back-end applications with e-gatematrix's portal tools. E-gatematrix's applications get real-time feeds from Delta on its flight schedules and passenger counts, for instance, and on its marketing systems. "These are major systems that keep an airline running. Airlines are very protective of how you integrate with them," Rouse says.

Aside from its online marketplace and forecasting tools, e-gatematrix also offers airlines menu-creation programs, galley planning and other programs. The portal, meanwhile, will be taking on a more international flavor later this year. E-gatematrix is adding multiple languages and currencies to the site to expand and better support overseas airlines. That transformation will take some redesigning of the site, so that a U.S. supplier, for instance, can list its products in various languages. "That's an additional level of complexity because we will have to support multiple names for the same product and potentially by customer," Rice says. "It will be a big challenge."

Kelly Jackson Higgins is a Network Computing contributing editor. She has been a technology writer and editor for 17 years. Write to her at kjhiggins@nwc.com.

SIDEBAR: The Hard Sell: Service Company Finds Proof is in the Concept

After spending nine months developing and customizing its eMarketplace ordering system and then testing it for the launch of the InFlight Exchange portal, the last thing e-gatematrix executives wanted to hear was that the ordering software had to be replaced. But the TradeMatrix software from i2 Technologies that e-gatematrix had installed wasn't written to handle the kind of large orders its airline industry customers needed to fulfill. And performance was especially important for the portal--and the company--to fly.

"As a start-up, every piece of functionality we were promising to customers was critical in establishing us as a credible player in the airline industry," says Shawn Rouse, director of business development for e-gatematrix.

It was an especially tough internal sell because e-gatematrix's IT department wanted to purchase the new software from the same vendor that had sold them the failed package, i2, which since has purchased and rebranded RightWorks' software. "There was some skepticism at first about sticking with i2 because of the issues with the TradeMatrix product," Rouse says. "Not only was finance hard to convince, but so was procurement--they wanted to make sure this time we could get the functionality we needed." But soon they realized RightWorks was the best fit and gave the change-out the green light.

The final selling point was that RightWorks supported the many-to-many relationships of InFlight Exchange's eMarketplace, while most packages were designed for one-to-many relationships in which the portal sells products to multiple buyers. "There are up to four parties involved in a transaction, including us, the airline, the buyer [caterer] and the seller [supplier]," Rouse says.

But even with the new software, e-gatematrix encountered some initial performance problems. The IT team had to tweak the way the application indexed the database. "We had some hiccups with the catalog taking an excessive amount of time to pull up," Rouse says. Our IT team worked closely with i2 to optimize the database and quickly resolve the problem, he says.

E-gatematrix has a strong working relationship with i2, but the company now insists on a proof of concept from its technology vendors, with live testing at an earlier stage. That's what the company did, Rouse says, with its purchase of Netegrity's user-management and administration software for airlines and suppliers to use on the portal.

SIDEBAR: 15 Minutes with Charles Rice CIO, E-gatematrix, Atlanta

Charles Rice, 40, has spent 21 years in IT. He joined E-gatematrix around three months ago and now spearheads the InFlight Exchange portal for the Atlanta-based airline services company.

Education: B.A. in economics, B.B.A. and M.B.A. in marketing.

Biggest lesson of the InFlight Exchange portal: How important it is to do performance testing with "real" order data and order sizes instead of trusting vendor benchmarks.

Biggest lesson from building the portal: Take the amount of time you think you will spend on customization and double it.

Next time, I'll: Spend a lot more time storyboarding content and its look and feel for users.

Biggest technology flop ever: Former online grocer Webvan. It took a low-margin business, eliminated 90 percent of the profitable impulse items (nail clippers, candy, magazines, soda) that you can easily buy in the check-out aisle, and spent $1 billion on technology.

Best advice ever received: Always move forward. It's easier to turn a moving boat.

Worst advice ever received: A vice president once told me, "The problem with you is that you expect the best from people and are always surprised if that's not what you get." That said a lot about how I choose to manage people, and it said even more about him.

For fun: I collect Kurt Cobain/Nirvana memorabilia.

Wheels: Infiniti I35--but I consider my car a method of transportation, not an extension of my personality.

Biggest bet ever made: Fifteen years ago, I bet the director of technology at my former company, Van Waters & Rogers, that I could achieve a 10X application performance gain--and avoid a $2 million mainframe hardware upgrade--by tuning the system. He asked me if I was willing to quit if I lost, and I said yes. If I didn't deliver, I would have been fired because the company would not have had time to implement an upgrade to meet the forecasted processor demand. Luckily, I stayed with the company another five years.