Mark Ishikawa likes the idea of getting Midwest-quality employees for far less than “Silicon Valley prices.”

The CEO of BayTSP Inc., which makes anti-piracy software for the motion picture industry as well as products for other Fortune 500 companies, says he’s confident he’ll find a good supply of high-tech professionals locally to staff a 24-7 data center his company will launch this spring in Des Moines.

At BayTSP’s Los Gatos, Calif., headquarters, “right now I have people commuting two hours a day because that’s the only place they can find a house, and I’m paying them a lot more than Des Moines people would be paid,” Ishikawa told the Business Record. Rather than the “mid-level” Silicon Valley salaries of $65,000 to $85,000, however, the Des Moines programmers will be paid salaries in the $50,000-plus range, he said.

“The key thing for me is that if the employee is happy, you get a much better work environment,” he said.

Though the privately held company does not disclose revenue figures, Ishikawa said BayTSP has typically expanded its sales by 200 to 300 percent in recent years. “We are a very rapidly growing business,” he said.

The company’s expansion into Iowa is backed in part with a $3.8 million investment by Acuity Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund that has already invested in two other software companies, Protocol Driven Healthcare Inc. and GCommerce Inc., that have moved significant operations to Des Moines.

In December, the Iowa Department of Economic Development approved a $400,000, seven-year, no-interest loan to BayTSP, plus a $400,000 forgivable loan, both from the Community Economic Betterment Account. In its application, BayTSP said the new center will create 75 new jobs over a seven-year period, paying an average wage of $23 an hour. The agreement calls for the state to receive up to $800,000 in royalty payments from the company.

At the same December meeting, Acuity Ventures struck a deal with the IDED in which Acuity pledged to invest an additional $10 million to bring five more high-tech companies to Iowa over the next five years, in return for the state’s investment of an additional $2 million.

BayTSP’s planned $5 million data/operations facility will function as a “parallel processing center” for the company’s primary center in California. The company is considering an East Village location for the center, Ishikawa said, but various sites are still being considered throughout Greater Des Moines and it’s possible the operations may be located at more than one address.

Des Moines may also serve as a development center for new financial services software the company is testing, Ishikawa said. Though he declined to give details, company officials have earlier said that the product would identify “phishing” sites that mimic bank Web pages to trick people into giving out confidential information. The center may also provide technical support BayTSP’s product for pinpointing downloaders of child pornography on the Web.

Des Moines was chosen over four or five other cities across the country for the center, which will replace an existing facility in Houston that the company plans to convert into a data collection site.

“Really, the (Central Iowa) attitude towards work is really what made the decision for us,” Ishikawa said. “The people we met with weren’t interested in squeezing a lot out of the company; they wanted good, solid jobs.”

Des Moines’ accessibility to several fiber-optic “backbones” running through the city, as well as its location east of the Rockies, also made it a desirable spot for the data center, he said. The 24-hour operation will be used to continuously monitor the Internet to identify illegal uploading of BayTSP’s clients’ intellectual property.

“The Des Moines center will give us a second opportunity to try to find more bad guys,” he said. Because of the California center’s distance from the East Coast, “we’re missing the northeast part of the country. This will give us more access to the rest of the country.”

Staffing of the center could begin as early as next month, starting with the local hiring of a data center manager, Ishikawa said.

“We contemplated bringing people out from California, but we didn’t think that was going to be a good fit, because they wouldn’t be able to relate to the staff. If I bring someone from California, they’ll bring that work style, and I’m not sure that will mesh.”

BayTSP keeps track of illegal downloads

It’s the other “box office” that you don’t hear much about: the most popular pirated movies on the Web.

For the third month in a row, “Alien vs. Predator” was the top-pirated film online in January, as tracked by BayTSP Inc. The Silicon Valley-based software maker knows exactly which films are most often pirated, and even keeps a count of the number of illegal downloads — nearly 44,000 for “Alien vs. Predator,” for instance.

With the FirstSource software it released in January, the company can trace the source of thousands of illegal downloads to the initial uploaded file, which may slow the distribution of illegally obtained movies, software or music “and possibly make users think twice before doing it,” said CEO Mark Ishikawa.

BayTSP client companies can monitor the system through a Web-based interface, and have the option of automatically or manually issuing legal “take-down” notices, even while the downloads are still in progress. BayTSP also maintains evidence of the downloads in a database which can be used by its clients to pursue lawsuits against file sharers.

The company also monitors pirating of software applications. It appears those stealthy enough to illegally download software are also keen on protecting their own systems. The most-pirated software application? Norton Antivirus 2005.