Australia’s tablet PC guy

Hugo Ortega, self-described misguided geek and CEO of Tegatech, says he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his reseller business until he saw his first tablet PC and realised the need to distribute the product.

In 1999, Ortega came up with the Tegatech concept after a two-year stint with the United Nations. He came back to the country with no idea what to do, however a love of everything IT led him to create the company.

“I have been dabbling with IT all my life. I was always the in-house technician amongst family and friends and I have always loved building PCs,” he says.

“When I came back from the UN I decided to get my Microsoft certification and get started in the reseller channel.”

At the time, Tegatech was a value added reseller, providing small business products. Ortega even got “down and dirty with hands on networking and cabling and anything else a customer required”.

More than four years into the reseller game, Ortega wanted a new challenge.

“I didn’t want to be a technician any longer because my focus has always been to build the company up,” he said.

Tegatech made the transition from reseller to tablet PC distributor 18 months ago, when Ortega had a chance encounter with Dr Neil Roodyn, a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP).

According to Microsoft’s website, MVPs are “individuals with expertise in one or more Microsoft products who actively participate in online and offline communities.”

Roodyn introduced Ortega to the tablet concept and from there he was just “sold”. “I liken it to the birth of my first child - I had never seen anything so amazing. I took the tablet and realised I had to market this. I went out and sourced the rights to the product in A/NZ for representing Tablet,” says Ortega.

Tegatech doesn’t sell to end consumers, for Ortega there is a good channel of resellers loyal to the tablet.

“We have loyal customers in Australia and New Zealand and we have three sub-distributors. Tasmania, Melbourne and Queensland are the hot spots for us and we also have a lot of success in the mining industry,” he says.

Ortega believes competition is healthy and is not afraid of any attack on his business.

He says loyalty is hard to get. A bit of PCV is the same thing anywhere and the only differentiating point is the customer service a business provides.

“Our clients don’t complain about our service, expect for the general 10 percent the bunch of nut bags that follow every distributor.

“I have to have a list of guidelines that staff follows with every phone call and email – I am a control freak. I took that into the United Nations, you have to take that control into your environment.”

Ortega believes without a set of guidelines to run through, resellers won’t come back to company for a second experience, because at the end of the day they can get a tablet PC from anywhere.

The tablet game

Today, Tegatech has seven staff and an industrial warehouse located at Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The company’s stock intake has outgrown its warehouse and Ortega says Tegatech needs to go towards the inner-city circle and be amongst the distributor route.

“In the first quarter next year we should have a bigger premise and an office in Melbourne and NZ and take on more staff – that will be the next phase of the business,” he says.

“We need a lot more staff because basically I start work at 7:30pm answering emails and go to bed before one in the morning - sometimes I won’t go to bed until three in the morning, answering emails” he says.

Recently the distributor signed an agreement to distribute Samsung's Q1 Ultra Mobile PC locally.

The Q1 UMPCs were part of an initiative announced by Microsoft in March to develop lightweight, small form-factor ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs).

“This was such a huge thing for us because Samsung look after direct sales in the B2B space themselves. It was quiet a big pat on the back for us,” he says.

Ortega says an NDA prevents him giving out figures on the number of products he sells. For Tegatech, tablet PC is a “healthy and viable business” and through it Ortega has become known as the tablet PC guys.

Tegatech is focused on selling tablet PCs through to B2B, enterprise, corporate and government sectors.

“Right now we have customer that has supplied 100s of tablet PCs into Tabcorp. The betting agency uses them for data gathering. The dealer has the product as his knee side and basically inputs a couple of bits of information as to who is competing in front of him and then he feeds the information upstairs,” he says.

Ortega’s has also sold tablets to the Australian Institute of Sport. They use them on their treadmill, so the athlete on the treadmill. An athlete might press a button to increase or decrease the speed of the machine.

“These products come in different shape and size depending on the client. That’s why we chose to specialise because really the tablet is two things it’s either form factor or it’s an operating system.

“The OS is the pen feature so people could pick up a pen and write notes and that’s what didn’t take off - that was the concept Bill Gates really pushed on,” he says.

Ortega believes the defining feature of B2B tablets is the form factor. As he describes it a “tablet is a hand held device, pretty much designed to be used standing up unlike a laptop which designed to be used on the lap”.

Vendors like Microsoft and Fujitsu have also employed Ortega to discuss tablet PC with their clients. They get him go around Australia to promote and get people to comprehend the tablet PC a little better.

“I need to continually educate users on the products we have available. The tablet PC is still raw and naked enough that people don’t understand the concept until they take the product of the box,” he says.

Rebuilding Kosovo

Ortega’s drive and partly stems from his two-year stint as a volunteer with the United Nations, helping to rebuild war-torn Kosovo. During his time with the UN Development Program he worked in post-war Kosovo, spending a lot of time near tanks and hummers.

His role was to set-up refugee camps and help displaced people find homes. “I volunteered to help out the refugees fleeing from the [former] Yugoslavia. I spent some time volunteering here and got to know the people at the non-governmental organisation (NGO),” he says.

“I made some enquiries and some of the people I had worked with were going back to Kosovo to help there. I sold my possessions and got on a plane and landed in about five in the morning, during winter. Luckily an NGO picked took me to breakfast and from then on it was pretty much took it by the reigns and ran with it.”

During his two years in Kosovo, Ortega was paid $400 a month working under strenuous conditions helping to rebuild infrastructure.

“I remember the UN had to give me $400,000 in cash to pay contractors and people’s wages. I had to have two military police and a sniper on a building close by to protect me,” he says.

Charity work and volunteer work has always been one of Ortega’s passions although he’s a businessmen or entrepreneur at heart. “Being an entrepreneur is my birthright. The earliest business I set up was selling my Christmas toys, a month after the holiday. My mum would come home and catch me selling the toys which I had played with for a month,” he says.

“She would see me selling them on a street stall and kick my bum for getting money for my toys. I was happy with anything they paid me because it was full profit for me,” he says.