A NEW WAY TO WORK.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: Profiles of North Carolina Companies - Illustration - Statistical Data Included

High-technology spawns new Tar Heel industries and the means to prevent the end of some old ones.

Even Alan Greenspan has been heard to wonder about the durability of the current economic expansion, now in its eighth year. The explanation the Federal Reserve chairman has offered -- opaquely, the way he explains everything -- is that growth has continued with little inflation because companies are reaping the benefits of decades of investments in technology. In other words, computers, prodding productivity, have paid off.

But when Greenspan's mumblings get translated to real-life examples, half the story gets lost. Much is written and said about Silicon Valley, its denizens and the imitators in places like Research Triangle Park. But businesses that make the wood and cloth and concrete things we use every day get overlooked. Faster, smaller computers and e-commerce are treated as ends in themselves, which any businessperson who doesn't wear tiny eyeglasses and carry a Palm Pilot knows is bunk. Computers are tools. The Internet, another sales channel. Tools are worth what you can make with them; a channel, what you can sell through it.

That's why, to show the impact of technology on business at the turn of the millennium, BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA decided to reach beyond chip and code. Here's a look at a software start-up, but you'll also see how high-tech has transformed a small family-run apparel company and a big furniture maker. Traditional industries these might be, but without them you'd be sitting in front of your tangerine-colored iMac on the floor, naked.

The software company, Durham-based WebWide Information Systems Inc., is hardly out of its infancy, just a couple of guys with programming experience and an idea they believe will make them rich. To peek inside WebWide is to see what's happening in scads of start-ups in office parks and second bedrooms across the Triangle, Charlotte and the Triad.

For the traditional industries, embracing technology has not been so much about opportunity as necessity. Willie Royal, president and CEO of Royal Park Uniforms Inc. in Prospect Hill, knew his company, which makes school uniforms, wanted to stay competitive. No cybercowboy himself, he found people who could help him find what he needed. The same is true for Bob McKinnon. When he became president and CEO of Hickory-based Century Valdese Inc. in 1996, he recognized that his company's flagship, Century Furniture Industries, had to ramp up its technology to remain a leading maker of premium furniture.

Three companies, three different faces of technology. If Alan Greenspan spoke in anything other than dense tangles of economist jargon and numbers, they're the kind of examples of a changing economy he might point to.

It's a WebWide world

The shiny, red Mustang rolls into the parking lot of 42nd Street Oyster Bar in Raleigh, chrome rims flashing in the afternoon sun, dual exhausts chortling and growling. The driver has to be a bad boy, a tattooed, crew-cut GI on leave from Fort Bragg or a whippet-thin Richard Petty wannabe, sporting wraparound shades, cowboy boots and a black NASCAR T-shirt.

The car slides into a space, the door swings open, and a brown rubber-soled oxford, granddaddy-sensible, plants itself on the asphalt. Out comes the driver -- pasty pale, soft around the middle, rumpled. Pete Sramka, bad ass, has arrived.

He is a computer programmer of unusual ability, "a master, the sharpest I've ever seen," says his partner. Sramka, who owns WebWide Information Systems with Eric McAfee, will tell you so himself. While an undergraduate at N.C. State, he helped design a mechanical device used on the Space Shuttle. He'll tell you that. He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and one B on his transcript. He'll tell you that, too. He got offered research assistantships in engineering graduate programs at MIT and University of California at Berkeley. He accepted the position at Berkeley, then changed his mind. "I thought I could be one of the top five or six people in the field, but I didn't think it'd be fulfilling."

Sramka, 30, is disarmingly frank, as candid about his faults as he is about his strengths. Growing up in Fayetteville, he taught himself to program on a computer he bought partly with money he made handing out pizza coupons. He got his first job, as a technician in a computer store, at 14. "I looked 12, and none of the customers wanted to deal with me because they thought I was just a kid." By the time he was in high school, he was writing assembly language -- computer code more basic than even the operating system.

With McAfee (no slouch himself -- he chose programming over a career as a neurobiologist), he has written a program called Light. He hopes it will make him and his partner very rich. You know the drill: write a program, land a few big customers, do an initial public offering, make a hundred million, buy a Porsche, do it again.

For now, all Sramka and McAfee, 34, have is the dream and a program that lets incompatible software talk to each other. It's just the two of them, racking up debts. Sramka, who rises at noon and does his best programming at night, works out of his house. McAfee, a genial extrovert, keeps a paper-strewn office in a business incubator in RTP. That gives them a business address and place other than their living rooms to meet potential partners and investors.

Why care about these two and their little company? Because they're fueled by the same brew of smarts and chutzpah that has powered dozens of software start-ups in the Triangle and, to a lesser extent, in Charlotte and the Triad. A few, such as SAS Institute Inc. in Cary and, on a much smaller scale, Raleigh's Q+E Software (acquired in 1994 by Maryland-based Intersolv) and Accipiter (acquired in 1998 by Massachusetts-based CMG Information Services) have made a lot of money and created a lot of jobs. Like WebWide, all started with just a handful of people who could talk to machines, coaxing from them the daily tasks we have come to count on computers to perform.

What's more, Sramka and McAfee have a product, not just a piece of real estate on the Web they claimed by appending dot-com to some hobby or demographic. You know: WorkingMoms.com or Surfer.com, or, even better, WorkingMomSurfers.com.

Light is an application-integration program, sort of a United Nations translator for computers, letting business programs that speak different languages talk to each other via the Internet. McAfee says minimal programming is needed to tailor it to a particular program. Once it's in place, a company's information-systems chief can do any tweaking and maintenance with a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator. "We're like email for databases. We're a Swiss army knife for data. There are any number of ways we can slice it, dice it and distribute it." Sramka mapped out Light -- "architected" is the term he uses. Then he and McAfee spent, they guess, more than 5,000 hours writing code in the Java language. Sramka picked up a manual at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and they taught themselves.

They met while working as programmers for a company called Utility Translation Systems in Raleigh. Both already had a penchant for Silicon Valley-style job hopping. After State, Sramka took an engineering job at Caterpillar Corp., staying seven months. Then he tried selling pumps and motors to manufacturers but didn't like it. In 1994, he got a software-development job with IVIS International in Raleigh. He lasted a year and a half. "I tried to overthrow the president." From there, he signed on with UTS, where he reported to the same supervisor as McAfee.

McAfee had learned programming in high school, attending the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham and graduating from Chapel Hill High. He majored in biology at UNC Chapel Hill, taking two semesters off to sell tie-dyed and silk-screen T-shirts he'd made with a friend. After graduating, he refined his programming skills while working in a UNC neuro-physiology lab. His boss needed data-acquisition software, and McAfee learned the C programming language to write it. He applied to medical school but got wait-listed. The professor he worked for encouraged him to get a doctorate, but he took a programming job in Wisconsin for a company that made food cans. He stayed three months. Next came Applied Analytical Industries Inc., a Wilmington contract researcher for drug makers. A year and a half later, he got an offer from a group of ex-Applied Analytical employees who had started a company called PharmComm Inc. He was there two months before leaving for UTS.

There, Sramka and McAfee became lunch buddies. Over sandwiches at Subway in early 1997, they decided to start their own company. They didn't know exactly what sort of software they'd write. But they knew they had the skills to figure out something, and working for themselves had to be better than slogging for somebody else. (Originally, they had a third partner, a friend of Sramka's from college who bailed out early.)

They incorporated on May 13, 1997. That September, Sramka quit UTS, fed up again with what he saw as people more interested in office politics than writing good software. "It was the third time I quit without having a job lined up. I was burning bridges out the wazoo. I knew I shouldn't do it. I'd had these guidelines for myself on my wall in college. One of them was: 'Don't let your emotions beat you in contests of intellect.'"

Programming again saved him, landing him at Glaxo Wellcome Inc. He promised himself he'd focus on his job and not tell other people how to do theirs. If they wanted his opinions about the quality of their code, they'd ask for them. He stayed six months, leaving in March '98, this time on good terms. Web Wide was far enough along that he could work on it full time.

McAfee, by now married and a father, kept his UTS job a little longer, then did stints at IBM and a Durham-based...