Aussie on a bet

Netlan’s German managing director, Gunter Baurhenn, very nearly did not make it to Australia at all. “I came to Australia to win a bet,” Baurhenn admits.
 
After completing a degree in radio communications at Frankfurt in 1975, where he specialised in data, Baurhenn started work for Mannes-Tally where he stayed for three-and-a-half years as a system engineer.
 
He had decided to emigrate some time before and initially wanted to go to Canada but there was a migration freeze there at the time. “I was in a group of 12 engineers back at Mannes-Tally in Frankfurt. I had always wanted to emigrate.”
 
“One day we were sitting around talking in the workshop and I said I wouldn’t mind going to Australia -- I’d go there tomorrow,” Baurhenn recalls.
 
“My workmates dared me to and three months later I was in Sydney. Luckily my Frankfurt boss knew his opposite number at Warboard and Francke, the company that sold Mannes-Tally kit in Sydney.”
 
“He called the guy and said, 'I have an engineer in my office who wants to emigrate, do you need one?' The guy in Australia asked if I could drink beer. My boss replied, 'Oh he can drink beer'.  'Then let him come' was the reply.”

This slightly devil-may-care attitude extends to Baurhenn’s leisure time. Although he no longer pilots aircraft any more he has held a pilot’s licence for many years; he is now into more earthbound adventures.

“I’m into adventure riding, riding motorbikes through deserts. About three years ago I had an engine failure near the Simpson Desert -- between Arkoola and Birsdville. I wasn’t in any real danger: I had an emergency beacon, a two-way radio and I got in contact with somebody on the [Birsdville] Track who told me about a homestead about 80 kilometres away.”
 
He says he died four times trekking up to that homestead. “And one of my daughters had to drive 1900 kilometres to pick me up.”
 
The experience has not put Baurhenn off though. He would like to compete in one of the really big motorcycle rallies such as the Paris-Dakar or even the Australian Safari. “Before that though, I’d like to go from Germany to Russia,” he says. “I ride a KTM640. I’m 55 now, and I would like to do it before I’m 60.”
 
Baurhenn arrived in 1980 and was actually the last “assisted passage” engineer sponsored by the Australian Government for data communications.
 
He started at Warboard and Francke and worked there as a service engineer for a year-and-a-half before joining Osborne Computers as service manager.
 
“They had the first portable computer on the market back then so it was interesting times,” says Baurhenn. After only a year he switched to Data Peripherals, later Datamatics, which was Novell’s master distributor in Australia. He stayed there for four-and-a-half years as service manager and later engineering manager.
 
It was while working for Data Peripherals that Baurhenn was caught up in one of the major shifts in the IT industry -- the advent of the local area network (LAN). He believes this is to his great advantage.
 
“I installed one of the first Novell operating systems in Australia, which was for the law firm Clayton Utz,” he says. “Part of that job was to design one of the very first LANs in Australia and I’ve been doing it ever since; ARCNET, Token Ring, Ethernet – I’ve designed, installed and implemented all of them.”
 
After his stint at Data Peripherals, Baurhenn decided to start his own business. “It was quite an easy decision to start my own company. I was engineering manager for Data Peripherals but my after-hours job was designing LANs, which in those early days no-one in Sydney did.”
 
“My boss took advantage of this and made lots of money before I said, 'Hang on, here I am working for a salary, not getting anything from doing all this high tech design; I can make a living out of this'. So I quit my job one Friday afternoon and started the business the next Monday morning. It was 4 September 1987, and I’ve never looked back since.”
 
Starting off as Netlan Engineering, Baurhenn later changed the name to simply Netlan and while he has maintained the company’s core business of doing design, installation and implementation of LANs and WANs, over time he has moved with the market.