When Forbes magazine listed the 200 best small companies in the US this month, Abacus Direct was ranked number three. That was no small feat for Mr Tony White, a native of Dundalk and the firm's chairman and chief executive.

It is nine years since Mr White (49) founded Abacus Directs like to be a successful entrepreneur in the United States and the role technology has played in his business. Abacus Direct which manages a database of consumer buying history on 88 million out of the 100 million households in the US. The database holds details of 1.5 billion transactions which are used by direct marketing companies to predict people's shopping habits. Among those details is information on the type of catalogues they get, how often they shop, how much they are prepared to spend and when they are prepared to spend it. In fact, 38 million people in the US support the whole catalogue industry "and we know who that 38 million are", says Mr White.

Most people who live in the US know how frustrating it can be to continually receive catalogues by mail for products or services of no interest to them. The reason for this, says Mr White, is that catalogue companies are not using data to make proper marketing decisions.

To make the marketing drives of catalogue companies

marketing efforts more effective, Abacus helps them target their catalogues to the appropriate consumers. It costs the average catalogue company $0.70 (47p) to mail a catalogue to an individual and often these efforts are ignored and the catalogue is thrown in the bin.

But by being able to spot trends and direct catalogue companies to the right people "we estimate we save catalogers $25 million in not mailing", says Mr White. "We can vastly improve the responsiveness to a mailing," he adds. In order to bring all this purchasing information together to create a valuable information tool, "we had to convince the catalogue companies to give us their most valuable asset - their customer base".

He originally thought it would take 100 catalogue companies to get to a critical mass of information but in fact it took 300 such firms and three years to get there. Today, Abacus has information from 1,000 catalogue companies giving it the largest proprietary database of consumer catalogue buying behaviour in the US. Some 12 months ago, Abacus Direct branched into retail companies and is also targeting those in technology, financial services, publishing and telecommunications. It is also going after 500 small and medium-size enterprises.

The company has built its own statistical modelling database and has developed techniques to manipulate the data. "It takes five weeks and $30,000 to create one statistical model," says Mr White. "We made the leap and tried to automate the modelling process and pulled it off. Today, we produce 4,000 customised models each month inexpensively."

IBM initially housed the data for Abacus Direct but to save money the company took it inhouse. With hardware from Sun Microsystems it built its own database in a Unix open system environment which is highly scalable. Abacus Direct has 230 employees and the bulk of its operations are in Westminster, Colorado with additional offices in New York's Rockefeller Plaza - where Mr White is based - Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta. Last year, the company's revenues were $31 million and Mr White expects margins this year to be in excess of 35 per cent more than last year. On November 14th, the company announced it was moving to Europe in a 50/50 joint venture with a Dutch company called VNU and set up an office in London.

Born in Castleshane, Co Monaghan, Mr White grew up in Dundalk where he attended De La Salle College. He went on to graduate from Economic and Social Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. A lifelong love of America began when he came here as a student on a J1 visa and worked as a travel representative for Bord Failte.

Mr White's start in the database marketing industry came in 1978 when he was selling advertising for an American company and discovered that it had a database which allowed it, with some degree of certainty, to predict what a customer in the database was going to do.

He joined a start-up company called National Demographics in 1981 and when that company was sold to RL Polk in 1988, he held the post of senior vice-president and general manager. He spent the next year defining the concept and attracting the funding for Abacus Direct.

He found another Irishman, Mr Frank Kenny, in Boston who had a venture capital firm called Delta Partners. In a deal between them Delta Partners invested $5 million.

At the end of year three, more venture capitalists were brought on board and on November 1st, 1996 Abacus Direct went public on the Nasdaq stock market at a share price of $14 under the symbol ABDR. It is now trading at around $50 and Mr White owns 5.6 per cent of the stock. "The market is very unforgiving if you miss even one quarter," he says. "You have to be very confident that you're going to deliver year on year. We've done extremely well and have over-delivered on analysts' predictions."

In the direct marketing industry in general, Mr White adds, "there is still a lot of old thinking out there". However, businesses are moving away from looking at tonnage - that is, untargeted mass mailings - to concentrating on results.

"Companies are mailing to smaller universes. They are spending a lot more time and money on information that will help them decide who are the best people at this point in time for this particular offering." That way, he says, they don't spend excess money on paper, print and postage.

He sees the Internet as a tremendous tool not just ultimately to acquire new customers but to enable companies do a better job at managing their customers. "Just being able to send a thank you email within minutes of an order being placed and being able to make another offer is a logical extension," he maintains.

And Internet companies are discovering Abacus Direct. Mr White recently negotiated a joint venture with a company called Catalogue City in which Bill Gates of Microsoft is an investor and Mr White sits on the board. "Its mission is to put every page of every catalogue in the country on the Internet," he says.

Mr White says he is now talking to other companies as potential joint venture partners or for possible acquisitions.