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.
“Security is the number one demand in the industry at the moment. If companies don’t have adequate security, they’re wide open to abuse. We have a corporate business but also a lot of education clients and there you need to have protection inside and outside,” Baurhenn says.
While Baurhenn has a solid track record of picking the trends in the market, he admits that sometimes other factors are involved. “Deep down I’m an engineer but I have a good feeling for the way the market moves and I think that’s one of the reasons why Netlan is here and still very strong in the marketplace. But then again getting into the education market wasn’t a deliberate decision.”
Netlan was doing contract work for IBM and other vendors in the early days when these companies did not really understand network topology, he says.
“They’d say we’ve got an IBM network with token ring and it’s very passive. We had equipment that was very active token ring kit so we were asked by IBM to go in and fix the problem.”
“We compete against huge companies that may do the job a bit cheaper or they buy the job but we are there for the long run. We’re flexible enough to move and change whenever the industry demands it.”
One of the first of those changes that Baurhenn picked was the move away from Novell towards Microsoft in the networking software market.
“In my time in the industry I have seen companies that start off well, peak and crash and burn. When I was still in Germany, Tally was bought by Mannes; we had a really good story to tell but after a while there was nothing left.”
Each time it is the same thing, believes Baurhenn. Vendors think that they can do things better than the reseller. "I have seen it time and time again: big vendors have a reseller network but then they think there’s money to be made by getting rid of the resellers and going direct and that has caused the death of so many big companies in the IT industry. That’s what Novell did.
“Data Peripherals used to be the sole distribution for Novell and we had a great reseller network but then they basically just went stupid and took it direct.”
“I think the greed took over. But there was nothing wrong with the technology, we’ve still got clients that still very happily run Novell and it just works.”
Another part of Netlan’s success is that Baurhenn keeps the company very focused and will sometimes say no to a vendor or customer he believes is trying to take the company too far away from its core business.
In other cases he has been willing to tackle an opportunity in the market but in partnership with another company rather than by expanding Netlan’s capabilities.
“It’s only been in the last three years, for example, that we have taken on desktop integration. We’ve done this through a partnership with another company but between the two of us we’re able to offer a complete solution, from design and consulting to the cabling, the LAN and WAN equipment and desktop integration. We’re both independent companies and we’re part of a bunch of SIs around the country, which lets us roll out all over Australia under one banner.”
One of the gaps in the market Netlan has tackled in this way has been in the education sector, a niche in which Baurhenn has a long track record. “We’ve got education clients such as Pymble Ladies College (PLC) that have been with us since first putting in a LAN 15 years ago,” he says.
“PLC is a big school, it’s got 2500 users, but we’ve got quite a few schools out there that don’t have any IT staff at all and we saw that as being a gap in the market. We are able to do 60 percent of the work remotely while the remaining 40 percent we do on-site. The cost saving for the school is about half the cost of hiring an IT manager so everyone wins.”
It’s a perfect example of the shift in the market says Baurhenn. “Ten years ago a company could make money from dropping boxes but now there’s hardly any margin in hardware.”
PLC is not the only client that Netlan has kept on its books for well over a decade, says Baurhenn. “It’s very simple to keep customers that long -- 99 percent of our dealings are built on relationships and being honest with the people. If you can basically be flexible enough to work with them, meet their demands and give good to excellent service or beyond, you’ll always make money and keep the customer.”
Netlan has outlived three IT managers at PLC and it has been a similar situation with some corporate customers like Merck Sharpe & Dohme.
“The company has been there 16 years and we’re still dealing with them” Baurhenn says. “Other integrators have tried to get in there and have come and gone and we’re still there. The key is to do a good job, document everything and if a new IT manager comes in you make an appointment to see them.”
“Then it’s like having a dog: he either loves you or he hates you, there’s nothing in between. That’s what I’ve found in the industry. I lose some clients when the IT manager changes but that doesn’t happen that often. Also sometimes the vendor changes and they either love us or they hate us.”
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