A natural convergence.(about Convergence CT)

Six years age, when several major Wall Street firms invested a quarter of a billion dollars into Honolulu-based Internet data exchange firm Pihana Pacific, local venture capitalists called it a huge gamble. After all, lnternational data exchange is a complicated, risky business. These days, however, investors are showing restored faith (albeit, to the slightly less inflated tune of $8 million) in a few former Pihana executives, including founder Lambert Onuma, who joined together in 2001 to create yet another data based tech company in the Islands.

"I spent some rime in California, and I realized that the health care and pharmaceutical industries were really lacking in a lot of technologies," says Onuma. "So after we (former Gov. George Ariyoshi, Rob Albertson, Brad Mossman) all left Pihana, we said that was an area we should get into." Together, along with Alan Ito, the former chief information officer for the St. Francis Healtheare System of Hawaii, they formed Convergence CT and built a global healtheare data warehouse.

"Part of what we do is aggregate financial and operational data and then sell it to hospitals so they can compare the data to determine best practices," says Onuma. Heart surgeons in New York, for example, can study the methods of a team out in Hawaii. Sales of Convergence's DB*Focus software suite had been slow and steady throughout 2005, but this January, the company landed a $350 million, 10-year contract to build and house a database for American Medical Group Association subsidiary Anceta LLC. It was quite a coup for the Hawaii firm that competed with larger, established firms for the contract, bur Onuma says it's just the tip of the iceberg.

"The contract is so much more significant than just a dollar value," says Onuma. "What's most valuable to us is just to have that data." That's because the second part of Convergence CT's revenue model involves selling aggregated patient data--for which it now has the exclusive rights for AMGA's 50+ million patients to pharmaceutical companies. Industry experts estimate the worldwide healtheare information technology market to be more than $50 billion a year, with close to 10 percent of that being spent on patient data. With the new contract, Convergence is now perfectly poised to tap that market. "We valued that contract at $350 million, bur we're being really conservative with that figure," says Onuma. "I think it's worth a lot more. But only time will tell."