Ebridge is a Kentucky based company that fully manages reverse auctions for government, healthcare, education, and the private sector. They are the reverse auction provider for the State of South Carolina and Commonwealth of Kentucky. We’ve been lucky enough to have gained eBridge as a client back in 2009, when we began supporting the inherited code of their reverse auction site. We were elated in 2016 when we were chosen to overhaul the application.
Ebridge’s initial application had many performance issues. It could not handle bids from more than 10 suppliers, which limited its auction growth. The suppliers themselves were also confined to 10 line items per bid for the application to function properly. eBridge was limited by the technology used in their initial application. During an auction, the server would become impacted from the various requests for new information causing slowdowns in the retrieval of data and pertinent information. Information was not attainable in the real-time fashion expected and needed for their industry. eBridge needed an application that could support a dynamic bidding environment, where suppliers could place and change as many bids as needed. The application needed to support the information requests and serve it to their clients in real-time.
Our fortunate and long-standing relationship with eBridge allowed us to gain vast knowledge of their business structure and application needs. We excitedly chose SignalR to solve the communication issues their server had displayed previously. SignalR is a library for ASP.NET that allows for bi-directional communication between the server and clients. SignalR works with WebSockets, EventSource, Forever-frame, and Long Polling. Implementing SignalR provided amazing real-time web functionality to the application.
The front-end framework was updated using React. This JavaScript library, maintained by Facebook and Instagram, allowed us to display the data changes in the eBridge application without reloading the page. Any information and data changes throughout the reverse bidding process display in real-time without the need to hit the refresh button.
eBridge’s new application is no longer constrained by the size of supplier bids. The number of participating users in their reverse auction is limitless. Users no longer experience the server slow-down the previous application demonstrated. eBridge provides the real-time experience pertinent for its industry in a dynamic bidding environment.
