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Rare & Dear, Inc. #12
Emphasis changed with expansion, but growth stayed strong
Pacific Business News, Hawaii's Fastest 50,
16 July 1999. (Honolulu)
By Ed Rampell, PBN Contributor
When Ned Dana's Kauai computer company was incorporated in 1996, he chose a title not unlike a Hawaiian "kaona," a saying redolent with hidden meanings. Rare & Dear Inc. is a name in "acknowledgement of the staff" of 14, Dana said.
It is also a reference to the gorgeous Garden Isle, where the Silicon Valley born and bred Dana, and some of his staffers chose to relocate. And the initials, R&D, suggest research and development.
In 1998, the first time Rare & Dear Inc. sought to be listed as one of Pacific Business News' Fastest 50, the company won first-place honors, with a 1032 percent increase in revenues.
In 1998, the company expended and opened an office in Oakland. Since then, according to its president and tool master, then-primarily software development and consulting firm has changed its emphasis
"Rare & Dear is now orienting services around the Web," Dana said. "There is so much demand on the Internet. We are using the high-performance system Oracle, because of the sheer horsepower of Oracle's database."
"Oracle at its core is a database system," Dana Explained. "The software encapsulates functions of storing data in a repository. It becomes very complicated when many things happen simultaneously."
Cheap Tickets, one of R&D's local clients, sells a large volume of airline tickets daily over the Internet. Oracle - which Dana had helped to develop - is an efficient, smooth way of handling the rapid and high volume of hits, or visits to its Web site, Cheap Tickets can receive at the same time.
"The top e-commerce sites on the Web, such the bookseller Amazon.com, use Oracle," Dana said. "They have to run to Oracle for high-performance computing. Cheap Tickets is growing nicely and nationally. Information is registered and stored in a database. The volume is large; 100,000 customers need to accessed quickly."
Today, 49 percent of R&D's clients are in Hawaii, and 51 percent are on the Mainland. Rare & Dear has had only a handful of clients on Kauai, where "there's not a lot of need for Oracle."
While Kauai's Pacific Missile Range, which has used R&D's services, is an exception, after Hurricane Iniki in 1992, "we looked at the business, and there was enough going on at Honolulu," where Bank of Hawaii, the City & County government, Tesoro and others have been clients.
But considering the state's flat economy, Dana added, "We are very happy to tap into the market outside of Hawaii. I export and money into the state. That's part of the reason why I turned to the Web part of the business, so I can tap into the mainland market."
Although consultants from Kauai fly thousands of miles to serve these continental clients, R&D staffers are able to live on Kauai. This was a conscious lifestyle choice of Dana and his staffers, who fled what Dana called Silicon Valley's "rat race" for a higher quality of life at the Garden Isle.
"Technology is important, but life comes first," Dana told PBN.
In 1985, when Dana first visited Kauai as a tourist, he decided to relocate there because he wanted a change in lifestyle. He moved in 1988, bought a small computer company on Kauai and started what would become R&D in 1994. He capitalized the company personally with money he had earned working at Silicon Valley.
Dana explained that Rare " Dear 's formula for success "comes down to the commitment of the staff to quality. Revenues are important, but the quality of the work comes first."
"We earned ourselves a good reputation built on the quality of our work and high level of service," he added.
Part of R&D, Inc.'s strategy is partnering with other organizations, such as Millennia Vision, an Oracle consulting group based on the mainland.
"You work very hard on a team not only to get past individual differences, but to work as an ensemble whole," Dana said.
But not even an oracle can accurately predict what will happen to computer systems Dec. 31, 1999. "Y2K {the computer bug} makes business tougher. Especially in Hawaii, where there are not too many highly trained computer experts," Dana candidly admitted, as Rare & Dear dares to face the future.
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