You may have never heard of Decipher Inc., a Fresno-based software company.
But if you've ever filled out an Internet survey -- say, one asking you to rank the customer service of a Web site or choose your favorite version of a yet-to-be-released movie trailer -- it's possible that Decipher has heard from you.
"We've been pretty much underground in Fresno ," said Jamin Brazil , the company's 36-year-old chief executive. But "the kind of thing we work on, six months later, you can see it in a grocery store aisle or on the Internet" being offered for sale.
Behind the scenes, Decipher's market research software and services power surveys by some of the Internet's largest companies, like eBay and Pay Pal, as well as movie studios, consumer products companies and others trying to learn what their customers want.
Since founding Decipher in spring 2000 -- and moving from the Bay Area to Fresno later that year in search of an affordable base for the software startup -- Brazil and company co-founder Jayme Plunkett, 32, have brought about 50 employees on board, holding their own in the multibillion-dollar market research industry by making online data collection easier and more useful for their clients.
So when Decipher bought Hollywood-based Forefront Consulting Group, an eight-employee data management software company, for an undisclosed sum earlier this month, it wasn't just a merger of two complementary businesses, Brazil said.
It also was an example of a central San Joaquin Valley software company that can hold its own against its major metropolitan competitors, he said.
"We couldn't have done this out of New York , L.A. or Chicago ," Brazil said, pointing to the fact that Decipher has continued to compete against much larger firms that outsource programming work to China or India , which Decipher doesn't do.
Since moving to Fresno, Decipher has grown to the point where it serves about 120 clients with about 150 online surveys per month, Brazil said.
The company is projecting $10 million in revenue this year, and so far looks to be slightly exceeding those expectations, he said.
Escaping the Bay Area's sky-high office rents certainly helped Decipher survive its early growth years, and the comparatively lower operating costs continue to allow the company to offer salaries competitive with the Bay Area, he said.
A fringe benefit has been the job market, Plunkett said.
"We were surprised at the size of the talent pool," as well as the relatively high skill level, of technology-savvy job candidates in the Fresno area, he said.
So far, the company's mostly 20-something employees are all connected to Fresno, whether recent Fresno State computer science graduates or former Fresnans lured back by the promise of jobs, he said.
That is a growing trend among the 30 or so companies that make up the Regional Jobs Initiative's software cluster, said Walter Read, chairman of the computer science department at California State University, Fresno.
"We have a real pool of talent here," he said, including the 20 to 25 computer science students per semester who graduate from Fresno State . "There's a real potential for someone to come out here and take advantage of that."
Despite its recent purchase in Hollywood , Decipher plans to stay in Fresno, Brazil said -- and the employees of Forefront Consulting will remain in Hollywood.
But given the company's growth plans, Brazil and Plunkett may need to access that local talent pool soon.
In the coming months, the company expects to open a small East Coast office and launch a new application that would allow customers to write their own surveys, Brazil said.
The company might well find some room for growth in the $8.2 billion and growing market research industry, said Larry Gold, publisher of Inside Research, a Barrington, Ill.-based market research trade newsletter.
The business of online market surveys has been growing at about three times the rate of more traditional phone, direct mail or in-person forms of survey research, Gold said.
Online surveys made up about 36% of the estimated $3.3 billion survey research market in 2006, up from about 30% of the market in 2005, he said.
As for companies like Decipher providing software to that market, "if there's something they can design that's innovative, they could create a niche there," he said.
The reporter can be reached at jeffstjohn@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6637