Some people dream of leaving a boring job for the ephemeral glamour of Hollywood. For Robert Thompson, the journey from the boring workaday to a field he loves meant leaving Hollywood behind. Thompson founded Valencia Studios in 1986. Terminator 2 and Star Trek IV were filmed at Valencia during his time there, but Thompson never walked downstairs from his office to hang out with the actors. It was just a boring business, he says.

Thompson’s true passion lay in a subject many would consider yawn-inducing—international trade data. Even on his honeymoon, he avidly studied the newspaper for worldwide shipping patterns of corn.

(Thrilling or no, Thompson does not recommend focusing on statistics on one’s honeymoon.) Upon relocating to Tennessee after a stint in international consulting, Thompson pursued his dream. Now, he is the purveyor of the world’s most comprehensive shipping and trade information, encompassing 200 countries and all 50 U.S. States. If a banana crosses international borders, Thompson’s company CenTradeX, which he formed in 2001, will likely have it in its database. The newest version of his software, which sells at roughly $20,000 a pop, will show the container in which that banana arrived, which parties were involved in the transaction and how to get in touch with their competitors.

“No one wants to look at the whole world; they want to look at a small portion of it from their window pane,” says Thompson, who spent millions of dollars putting together his database when he learned that even the U.S. Government’s import/export numbers are often outdated and hard to interpret. Now, he has government agencies among his clients, including the State of California and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Thompson’s product is a result of compiling dozens of disparate databases he had purchased, just to see what might happen. When he was done, a Nashville company in the business of selling specialized medical equipment changed its business plan thanks to the information it was able to retrieve via CenTradeX.

“Rather than buying equipment from a U.S. reseller, they went to an original equipment manufacturer in Mexico, which improved their profit margins,” says Howard Cochran, international trade professor at Belmont University, who was one of Thompson’s first customers. Of course, trafficking in import/ export data has its challenges. Big retailers like Wal-Mart prefer their product sourcing information hidden, which takes some pizzazz out of CenTradeX’s offerings. Still, according to Jim Ake, executive director of Southern U.S. Trade Association, CenTradeX is poised to become “the industry standard for trade intelligence for years to come.”