Qualcomm's promising new business, digital cinema, would be a potential money-maker on someone else's drawing board, if not for Kim Haile. As president of Qualcomm Digital Media, among Haile's duties is to be on the constant lookout for new ways to use Qualcomm's digital expertise in new applications. So for her, the idea of using data compression, encryption and watermarking to enable Hollywood to go digital was natural. But it was an idea ahead of its time.

"We began looking at our compression technology for digital cinema about six years ago," says Gary Garland, vice president of business development for Qualcomm digital cinema. Although Qualcomm was nearly ready then to integrate existing digital communication technology with its own expertise, going full blast into Hollywood would have to wait until other technical problems could be solved.

One was the dim quality of digital projection.

"Three years ago, digital projectors could only generate about 3,000 lumens (light units)," Garland explains. "Now they are up to 12,000 lumens, which means that they have more than enough capacity to project a beautiful digital image across a 40- to 50-foot screen."

Disk storage for the trillion-byte files required for full-length movies also was too expensive until recently, Garland adds.(Although no Qualcomm technology was used, "Star Wars: Episode 1" is the most prominent film saved in an all digital format.)

But none of this deterred Haile. According to Garland, she protected and promoted the project internally, keeping her staff enthusiastic about it and giving Garland the opportunity to make connections in Hollywood, until the rest of the world caught up with Qualcomm.

Richard Sulpizio, Qualcomm's president and chief operating officer, is more succinct: "There wouldn't be any digital cinema at Qualcomm without Kim Haile."

Business associates and even friends use similar words to describe Haile, 41, the highest-ranking woman among Qualcomm's 7,000 employees — enthusiastic, collaborative, driven, passionate.

"Kim has the ability to see an opportunity, but also to make people like engineers enthusiastic about it," says Qualcomm's founder and chairman Irwin M. Jacobs. "She has been a very important part of building this business because she understands technical advantages and has marketing skills, but she also has the ability to work with people."

Sulpizio goes a little further.

"Although she is a nontechnical person, the engineers respond to her," he says. "She knows what she is good at, and what they are good at. She involves them and lets them know that their input is valuable at every step."

Haile herself says her emphasis is on relationships, although her background is in law. She came to Qualcomm in 1989 from the San Diego law firm of Gray, Cary, Ames and Frye, where she practiced business and commercial law. When fellow associate Steve Altman left for Qualcomm, he approached Haile to come along. Haile had recently returned from maternity leave and was trying to figure out how to combine motherhood with a profession where "the client's schedule is the schedule," she says.

Realizing two things helped her make the decision to leave. First, she says, she knew that she didn’t want to be relegated to the infamous "mommy track." Second, she recalls, "I had found in my legal work that I was always more interested in what my client companies did than in the intricacies of a contract."

Going to Qualcomm, then a much younger and more fluid business, gave her the opportunity to do legal work and be part of the broader business.

"I came to do contractual work with Omnitracs," Haile says, referring to Qualcomm's global satellite system for two-way messaging and position location. "But as in any young business, you always see a lot more things that need to be done."

This included infusing Qualcomm's Government Systems division with new energy using, says Jacobs, a combination of profit and patriotism "to motivate the engineers to work on government stuff when their impulse was probably to work on projects with more commercial application."

The reward for Haile and Qualcomm has been a leading role in the Pentagon's drive to overhaul how it obtains the services and products it needs.

"The government now looks for commercial products that can be modified for its own use, and for opportunities to partner with industry to develop products for government with commercial potential," Haile explains.

Thus, this month Qualcomm is introducing QSec-800, a new wireless telephone exclusively for government use, built on the same CDMA technology on which its civilian phone service relies. Working on existing commercial networks, this new telephone will use an advanced-level encryption and decryption to achieve Type I security, to which only government users will have access, and mobile interactive chat among a defined group of participants.

Haile's rise at Qualcomm has been pretty meteoric by any standard. From the Omnitracs contracts and legal department she became director of contracts and international programs, then vice president of business development. Later, as vice president of operations for Qualcomm CommSystems, she helped manage the Globalstar satellite telephone business until her promotion to senior vice president, then president, of the year-old Qualcomm Digital Media. (Qualcomm declines to reveal how many employees work in Digital Media or the division's revenues.)

Along the way up, Haile has picked up her share of honors, including being named a recipient of the YWCA's Tribute To Women and Industry award in 1994.

At least one longtime friend agrees that Haile's accent on relationships is her key to success in personal relationships as well. Kitty O'Connell of Carmel Valley and Haile have been close friends since the latter entered Occidental College in Los Angeles as a 16-year-old freshman.

While O'Connell describes herself as "a little more laid-back than Kim," she adds that people who approach life with the same passion as Haile can gain a loyal friend. "In friendship, if a person is not willing to put the same effort and thoughtfulness as Kim is, she will walk away," O'Connell says. "She is funny and warm and fun, and most of all generous."

Haile also is "a fantastic mother" to Brittany, 11, and Ryan, 9, O'Connell says.

At a time when national news magazines feature cover stories about women who have run away screaming from male-dominated high-tech companies to start their own ventures, Kim Haile's progress through the ranks at Qualcomm may seem like something of an anomaly. But she says sincerely that the so-called glass ceiling has not held her back.

"I have been the first woman to occupy positions in many of my promotions," she says, and adds that she found it inspiring that Qualcomm had a woman co-founder. (The 1999 Qualcomm annual report lists Adelia A. Coffman as a co-founder of the company and former chief financial officer and senior vice president.)

"But my issue isn’t to get more women in a (meeting) room. I want to go above that level and be making significant contributions to this organization."

Still, she expresses a few of the misgivings that most working mothers face. "I make no secret of my kids, and I have no problem excusing myself from a meeting to call them or asking that a meeting be scheduled in San Diego so I can attend an event," she says. But, she adds, "I know I may suffer an unconscious penalty when I do."

But apparently not in Sulpizio's book. "She has the potential to do more around Qualcomm than she's already doing," he says.

Given that the only place left to go is the president's office, that may be a clue to Kim Haile's future.