GLOBALISM - the absolutely global nature of it.
Distance is so minor today that an old dispensary at remote Laupahoehoe, Hawaii, is a key test quality assurance lab for one of the world's fastest-growing high-tech companies.
VeriFone was founded on Oahu in 1981 but moved its headquarters to Redwood City, Calif. Its operations now spread over 100 countries. It may take in $500 million this year.
VeriFone has nine employees at Laupahoehoe and 90 at Mililani High Tech Park on Oahu- all working in a cybertech world alien to many parents or grandparents who labored in sugar and pineapple fields. Training at the University of Hawaii helped bridge the gap.
Keeping up with this kind of change offers opportunity for Hawaii. I wrote Tuesday about Dean Barry Raleigh's dream of making the University of Hawaii a high tech-attracting center like Stanford which spawned Silicon Valley or the University of Texas which has made Austin a smaller version of Silicon Valley.
We have the Maui High Technology Park, which houses one of the world's largest computers to service Air Force tracking operations on Haleakala. Half the computer time is available for commercial and educational use and is spawning new businesses.
In Central Oahu we have Mililani Technology Park - old enough to have grown into a beautiful work place with wide streets, 24-foot building setbacks, 40-foot height limits, trees and greenery. Its 101-acre Phase I is over half occupied, with 114 acres zoned for Part II.
At Mililani beside VeriFone are SETS Technology, a space tracking pioneer also on Maui; Oceanic Cablevision, a State Farm Insurance computer center, Honolulu Cellular, Inter-National Research Institute, Eastman Kodak, the data center for American Savings Bank, the Central Oahu district office of the Department of Education, and Crown Pacific Hawaii. A children's center is operated by Kaiser Permanente. Land is fee simple. Castle & Cooke Inc. is the developer.
We also have the state-run Pacific Innovation Center adjacent to the University of Hawaii's Institute of Astronomy in Manoa.
The state's shepherd for high-tech development, the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, also oversees the Natural Energy Laboratory at Keahole on the Big Island.
High-tech growth is slower than hoped. Mililani took a blow when one of its first tenants, Intelect Inc., relocated to Dallas, Texas. The mobility of high-tech companies can work to both Hawaii's advantage and disadvantage. High-tech jobs pay well for the most part and have lured some Hawaii residents home from the mainland, partly to use grandmother and grandfather as baby-sitters. The companies, on the other hand, can drive hard bargains with the state through their ability to threaten to go elsewhere. Intelect said it wasn't getting enough state support.
OUR assets include our think centers at the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center, the high-tech demanding command headquarters for U.S. military services, our attractiveness as a place to live, and living laboratories of natural science from mountain-top observatories, to volcanoes, to unique eco-systems, to special ocean research opportunities. Our liabilities include cost, business climate and school opportunities.
The Economic Development Corporation of Honolulu has organized a Hawaii Technology Council to bring together various sectors of the community and high-tech industries to help promote more high-tech growth here. Godspeed.