Kent Boom left Iowa when he was 31, and spent the next 18 years working for IBM Corp. Following nine job transfers around the country with Big Blue, he ended up in California, where he and a partner bought Hershey Systems Inc. in 1983.

Hershey, which specializes in providing document management software and services to colleges, has a client list that includes more than 100 universities across the country. Now, the company has chosen Des Moines as the site for a $6.7 million expansion project.

By late 2008, Boom hopes to have the ninth floor of the Midland Building downtown filled with a staff of 70 that will include software support specialists, software developers and salespeople. The average annual salary for the positions will be $62,000.

With offices in Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C., Hershey was seeking a location from which to build its Midwest business. The company is targeting Dec. 19 as the date the first employees will begin work in the office space at 206 Sixth Ave., which is now being refurbished. Hershey expects to have 10 Iowa employees in place by the end of 2006.

“We have clients from Washington to Florida, but we really haven’t done a lot in the Midwest,” Boom said during a recent visit to Des Moines. The company, which currently has 36 employees, expects to generate $6 million in revenues this year, he said. About 70 percent of those revenues come from the servicing of its existing accounts versus new business.

Similar to how Hershey gained contracts with North Carolina universities after opening its Charlotte office, Boom is betting that its presence in Des Moines will spur new business in both Iowa and the rest of the Midwest.

“Very seldom do we sell an entire university (on our system) at once,” he said. “You get in with one department, you have a success and word of mouth spreads. They say, ‘Hey, you ought to try Hershey.’”

Shortly after Boom hired Clive resident Ron Christian as vice president of sales, Christian suggested adding Des Moines to the company’s list of prospective expansion sites, which included Dallas as well as Charlotte and Los Angeles.

“It just made perfect sense,” said Christian, who will head the Des Moines office. “Hershey was looking to do an expansion, and I knew about Iowa’s economic development funds, so we started working with the state of Iowa.”

On Oct. 20, the Iowa Department of Economic Development approved a $400,000 Community Economic Betterment Account loan for the company. Hershey will also receive zero-interest loans of $140,000 each from the city of Des Moines and Polk County. Half of the $680,000 in loans will be converted to grants if Hershey’s Des Moines office creates 70 jobs within three years.

The company is also eligible to receive up to $50,000 in investment tax credits, $10,000 in sales tax refunds and $50,000 in research and development credits from the state’s Enterprise Zone program. It will also receive $500,000 in job training assistance through the state’s New Jobs and Income Program, in the form of training for both new hires and clients provided at Des Moines Area Community College’s west campus.

“We started in the document management business in 1987,” Boom said. “Back then, a single workstation sold for $49,000. So you can see why the technology has grown so, because the cost has come down so much. Everybody’s got document issues to deal with and processes to manage, especially in higher education. Paper drives the student body … everything is documented and we help manage that documentation.”

Something as seemingly simple as transferring credits from one school to another, for instance, can take a registrar up to 30 minutes to process, Boom said. With Hershey’s Singularity software product, “now we do it in three to five minutes, more accurately. It’s that kind of payoff that we offer to universities, and why we have such a compelling story when it comes to investing in this kind of technology.”

In addition to serving as a platform for expanding its business with Singularity, the Des Moines office will be the focal point for the assembly and servicing of Hershey’s DocBox XE, an “all-in-one” enterprise content management hardware-software package the company introduced 18 months ago. The company markets the product through about 25 resellers with expertise in servicing specific industries such as construction contractors and mortgage lenders.

DocBox “provides an alternative solution for small- to medium-sized businesses to become paperless as well,” Christian said. “We have about 250 customers on that system today, anything from a small mortgage lending company to a five-person law firm.”

On Jan. 1, Hershey plans to open a London office to serve European clients. Christian, who headed the European e-business division for Salt Lake City-based Zions Bancorporation’s e-business division prior to joining Hershey, said he expects initial orders of 1,000 DocBox units through the company’s reseller network.

Working in California, Boom said he has hired several former Iowans, and that’s why he’s confident about the quality of Iowa workers. “So we know the quality of people here,” he said. “They’re really good people. They’re loyal to you if you treat them right, and they see a future with us. So we think it’s an ideal combination.”

It’s also possible that some of the initial employees for the Des Moines office may come from L.A., he said.

“We have (employees) who have told us, ‘You know, I drive two hours to work, two hours home and I’ll never be able to afford a house close to work; I’d consider coming to Iowa,’” Boom said. “So it’s interesting that people in the organization from California have said it’s so hard to get around and so expensive that they’d consider a change.”