HDEP International is having a banner year. With annual sales of $1.7 million, the Honolulu business received Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award for 1997, earned recognition as one of Hawaii’s 50 fastest-growing companies, and was featured last month in a Honolulu Advertiser profile.

In a July interview, Virendra Nath, president of HDEP, expressed his pleasure at the attention his company has received, and at the growth and success of his business. Nath and partner Nancy Makowski started HDEP twelve years ago, with humble goals. “Most people begin with a vision of massive things, but ours was really small. We wanted to do something on our own, to live in Hawaii, to be able to travel. It’s grown much beyond that, and with the new things that we’re doing, it promises to get even bigger.”

With only three employees in Honolulu (Nath, Makowski, and project manager Kathy Neary), plus two talented interns, the company has close ties with associates in California. “We call them partners because we have been working with them for ten years,” chuckles Nath. “Our relationship with them defies description.” Their businesses closely complement HDEP’s own.

The company has provided offshore data entry services for over a decade through Datascope Communications, which employs 300 data-entry staff. In 1987, HDEP purchased a 40% share of the facility from a prominent Manila family who started it, says Nath, “as a way of creating employment in the Phillippines.” A committment to quality is stressed strongly; operators are tested at a minimum of 12,000 keystrokes per hour with 99% accuracy; all are college-educated with fluency in English. Additionally, each operator is trained to recognize anomalies in source documents, and to take action based on the customer's use of the data. The facility is equipped to key from microfilm, microfiche, digital images and paper.

Projects are diverse and huge in scope: entry of the location of every underground fuel storage tank in the US; 75 years’ worth of property transaction records from San Joaquin, CA; driver’s license information for the State of New Jersey. A recently completed project, funded by a Mellon Foundation grant, involved “a bazillion documents in Portugese,” according to Nath. Prior to automation, these 19th century Brazilian government reports were only available in a few places around the world. Now that the project is done, the documents are available to any researcher with Internet access.

Gateway to the Orient

HDEP once stood for Honolulu Data Entry Project, though the scope of the business has changed so much that the name is no longer accurate. Although the meat and potatoes of HDEP’s enterprise is data entry and database construction, the company has invested an enormous amount of time and money in AccessAsia.com, an international trade site on the Internet.

AccessAsia is still in development, but it already has almost 1,000 subscribers in over 41 countries, most of whom, Nath believes, discovered the website simply by “tripping over it; once they find it, they buy it.” Within the AccessAsia site is an online directory called Orient Business Express (OBE), which lists and categorizes almost one million businesses in eight major Asian cities. Updated annually, the database contains company information like name, address, phone, and industry type/SIC code. Fax numbers are listed for about 30% of the companies. Additional detailed information, including key contacts, sales volumes, and banking relationships, is provided for 30,000 companies. Prospective subscribers can even “test-drive” the site on the Internet, to see if it might be beneficial.

At just $95 per year for complete Internet access, plus a CD Rom containing the OBE, the service seems a bargain for any company doing business in Asia. But Nath wants to add greater value for his subscribers. “Beyond research, there isn’t much you can do with OBE. Before we actively start to market it, we want to give people a way to reach the companies on the database without compromising our ownership of the data.”

This year, AccessAsia will unveil an Internet-to-fax service that will make tens of thousands of these Asian companies easily and inexpensively accessible to the global business community. “The commercial faxing business is a $700 million business in the United States,” reports Nath, “and I’ve come across no broadcast fax service in Asia, none.” HDEP currently has a fractional T1 line in its Honolulu offices, and uses Pentium servers running on Windows NT. Eventually, fax servers will be added in each of the cities represented in the database, at a cost that is still unknown.

Although he believes it’s too soon to identify potential customers for the service, Nath offers a few possibilities. “Let’s say an advertising company in New York wants to get certain qualities of paper from Hong Kong or Taipei. They will be able, in one place, to [send] targeted companies requests for information, or requests for bids.” Nath also mentions newsletter publishers as potential clients. “Those with four thousand customers in Asia will be able to develop a list and send updates.”

Nath does not expect that AccessAsia subscribers will utilize the service for “junk” faxes, though he concedes the possibility, and will give companies on the database the ability to “opt out” of the service, if they wish. “[This service] is designed as a business-to-business product,” he stresses, “and we hope that people will use it for legitmate purposes.” To lessen the possibility of spamming, HDEP will charge subscribers about 40 cents per page. Nath maintains that this is a significant reduction in cost over the standard cost for a fax to Asia, which can be as high as $1.50 per page from the mainland to some parts of Asia, and even more from Europe.

The AccessAsia website will undergo major changes as new features are added. These include the Internet-to-fax service, online credit reports, a buy/sell bulletin board for active trade requests, and links to subscribers’ home pages. Nath also plans to add comprehensive information like annual reports and stock price history. Even in its early stages, however, AccessAsia.com is striking, user-friendly, and easy to navigate. Subscriber George Bye of the Southeast Asia Joint Venture Corporation is quite pleased with the service: “In a matter of seconds I was able to locate concrete service providers in Asia for an overseas project."

Nath demonstrated the broadcast fax prototype, still under construction. It is beautifully simple, and the utility for writing messages is familiar and includes fields like subject and title of addressee. Subscribers will be able to save up to 99 fax lists, and the unlimited number of records in each list can include both OBE companies and their own additions. After the list of recipients is created, subscibers will be shown the total projected cost for the entire transmission, which will then be deducted from an established account with HDEP. Companies will eventually be given an option to add their own logos to their faxes, for further personalization.

Growth As An Inevitability

Nath feels that the growth of HDEP has been more a process of evolution than one of deliberate strategy. He sites acquisition of the Manila business as an example. Originally, HDEP planned to outsource all of its data entry projects. “But we found out early that in order to maintain the quality, we had to have our own facility,” he states. Growth was inevitable after the acquisition. “The moment that you’ve made that committment, you’re on a continuing treadmill of increasing growth. You can’t stop and say ‘I’ve made enough money this year, I’m gonna take off for three months’, because if you do that, you’ve broken your promise to the people [who work for you].”

What lies ahead? Although HDEP has invested hugely in AccessAsia, that product has yet to be a moneymaker; the company’s successful data entry business continues to keep it comfortably in the black. “Within ten years, I expect that AccessAsia will be profitable,” Nath says. “We have 1,000 subscribers now. I’ll be happy with 5,000 over a few years --- a steady increase.”

A modest vision, indeed.