L.A. Company’s Software Survives and Thrives After New York’s Terror Ordeal
By CHRISTOPHER KEOUGH
Staff Reporter
Sept. 11 forever will be a dark day in American history, but it will be an anniversary of mixed emotions for Matt Walton and E Team.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center put E Team on the map when it thrust Walton and his Canoga Park company’s Web-based emergency management software into a must-perform operation.
E Team software, developed in 1995 as a military tool, provides a clearinghouse network of emergency management information. It’s a virtual conference room on the Internet, where police and fire departments can see what’s going on with government agencies, nonprofits, utilities and other organizations involved in management of an event crisis or controlled.
Once built and enabled, the platform is available to anyone with an Internet connection and the password to the site. A fireman at Ground Zero can log in and see that 5,000 blankets were delivered to the Red Cross. An emergency medical technician can see that blood supplies are running low. A public works engineer can see that a building was damaged and might not stand much longer.
The system contains detailed maps, sometimes down to floor plans, and keeps schedules of events marches and demonstrations and can inform officials of how many personnel and what sort of equipment is available to cover an event.
E Team platforms for cities can be delivered in a day. States take 72 hours. Entire regions can be put together in less than a week’s time.
“If Gov. (Tom) Ridge (director of Homeland Security) wants to do something quickly,” said Walton, E Team president and chief executive, “he can buy this out of the box.”
New York City purchased E Team’s software last August, with plans to install it Sept. 17 on servers housed in 7 World Trade Center. Within minutes of the attacks, which ultimately felled 7 WTC, e-mails were bouncing between Manhattan and Walton’s Los Angeles home (phones were not working).
A day later, the software was up and running on servers in Southern California, coordinating the massive rescue and recovery efforts of 1,400 people from 200 public, private and nonprofit agencies. The success of that literal trial-by-fire has put E Team at the head of the class in an emerging industry.
“We had the opportunity with 9-11 to accomplish what we set out to do five years ago,” said Walton. “It’s validation of the solution and there’s been a scramble in the last four months for people to, first, get their arms around the problem, train for the solution, and start actively looking for that solution with the funding to pay for it.”
Matthews declined to discuss E Team funding, beyond saying that private and venture investments have been made. He would not discuss the cost to customers for the software.
What’s clear is that the company has landed some high-profile contracts. E Team software, through a contract with the state of Louisiana, was to be employed for coordination of agencies at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. E Team also was selected by the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command to coordinate management of the 2002 Winter Games this month.
Numbers closely guarded
While confident E Team is on the verge of great success, Walton would talk only generally about what has happened to his business in the last five months.
“We’ve certainly done in excess of $1 million since 9-11, directly related to that event,” he said. “In terms of the number of contracts that we’re negotiating, it’s a 50 percent increase in our contract activity. On a going-forward basis, we’re a profitable company.”
Before Sept. 11 there were a half-dozen companies marketing multi-entity incident management software akin to E Team’s. The number of companies has grown since, Walton said.
Among those competing with E Team are ERI International Inc. of Olympia, Wash., and industry giants SunGard Data Systems Inc. of Wayne, Pa., and IBM Corp.
Robert Freeman, emergency preparedness coordinator for the city of Los Angeles, said E Team has worked wonderfully for the city since it adopted the technology in 1997. L.A. used E Team to brace itself for the now mythical Y2K rollover and for the Democratic National Convention in 2000.
Freeman said efficient information management systems are critical in a city with 40 departments operating as many as 100 workstations in an emergency or during an event such as a political convention.
“It allows us to have multiple people seeing the status of incidents and it’s updateable on a real-time basis,” Freeman said. “It’s like an up-to-date status board.”
Seizing the opportunity
Walton said he would be taking advantage of the increased business to invest in the product and upgrade the software with improvements that came out of the Ground Zero experience.
The main area of attention for the 25-person firm will be making software completely usable on wireless devices. Walton said the programs were run on wireless machines at Ground Zero and from piers in lower Manhattan, but the finite availability of wireless bandwidth is an issue E Team will try to address by developing programs that use less bandwidth.
E Team also will be doing a great deal of marketing to reach as many potential customers as possible.
Freeman said E Team is far from perfect the city believes it has better mapping resources but company officials have welcomed suggestions for improving the product.
“I would say, particularly in the last year or so, the company is responsive to suggestions from users,” Freeman said. “They learn when people use it and we’ve made suggestions, format issues.”
Marketing pitches are sure to find more willing ears in light of heightened awareness and E Team’s track record of success. “There are hundreds of thousands of entities that could use us,” said Walton. “To be successful we have to sell hundreds.”
