"I can only talk about this now, since it's public information, but I was working on the Blackbird, a secret Lockheed plane that is still the fastest plane in the world," said Hallam, then a flight test engineer at the giant aerospace company. "It was the successor to the U2 spy plane, and it flies at 2,000 mph."

Hallam sees solid parallels between developing that state-of-the-art plane and his current role in moving the electronic component distribution business from bricks and mortar to electronic distribution.

"It's the same idea, doing things that have never been done and changing the notion of the way things are done," said Hallam, who is president of the Internet Business Group at Arrow. "In our group, we have a formal reward program for people who think out of the box. That underscores how important innovation is."

While many technical companies are building the components for the Internet revolution, distributors like Arrow are helping to create an equally important aspect: a successful business model. Much of the infrastructure development of the past few years has been made in expectation that some day, the words "profit, revenue and Internet" will be synonymous instead of "profit" being the answer to "which term doesn't fit?"

Some industry analysts say that these distributors are leading the charge into electronic commerce, largely because some of their key customers are engineers who are very comfortable working in this environment. Though distributors are going to play a key role in making the Internet a viable business tool, its emergence hasn't always been viewed as a positive development for component distributors. When the e-commerce craze began, some industry analysts foretold a shift away from the well-established, old-line distributors.

"A couple years ago, the industry gurus said the Internet was the death knell for us. But our success with it made our employees comfortable that the Internet is a good thing for Arrow and for them," said Hallam, who received his systems engineering degree from MIT. "Two years ago, when we started creating this group, we thought we were behind, so we went to consultants and software companies. It turned out they were less experienced than us."

Distributors are succeeding because they can provide engineers with pricing and technical data on a number of devices, eliminating the painstaking process of checking each vendor's site to get information. Engineers who are determining which components they want to use in their designs are responding quickly as distributors put more and more data online. Businesses will have to figure out ways to make that data readily accessible. Today, a system designer normally has to go to a handful of Web sites to get information on all the parts on a board. To Hallam, this fragmentation is far more critical than any of the technical roadblocks.

"One thing I think is still a bottleneck in terms of usage is that even today there is no single database for all parts," Hallam said. "The biggest request we get is from engineers who want to be able to put in the parameters for a flash chip, like voltage and capacity, and get the information regardless of the manufacturer. Today, it's like going into a public library and not having a single card catalog. You have to go to the history section for history, the science section for science."

One thing that will help in this goal is the development of Rosetta Net, a standard that provides a common format for component makers, distributors and customers, so all of them will use similar terms and forms when they are sharing data. All the big distributors, including Arrow, are supporters of the standard. While Hallam is bullish on Rosetta Net, he doesn't feel that any glitch in its development will be a big setback for electronic commerce.

"Today, I don't think bandwidth is an issue, every engineer in North America has enough bandwidth," he said. Instead of technical issues, Hallam looks back to the concern that flavors every business transaction: the human factor. In his view, "The number one pacing item is people changing how they do business. The technology is much more ready than people are. Many purchasing people are still concerned with the safety of their data."

The speed needed in today's market will be a big factor in the shift to electronic commerce. "Five to 10 years ago, it was considered good if you could deliver within one or two days of the target," Hallam said. "Now it's considered a serious failure if it doesn't arrive in the morning, when they often tell us what they want just the day before."

That human aspect is also familiar to Hallam, since he spent time as vice president of human resources at Arrow. He said that experience has benefits in his current job, since a lot of aspects of making hay off the Internet hinge on motivating people.