Max Fredericks, who began his career as a trainee accountant, literally fell into the IT industry in 1969 while working at Illawarra County Council.
"Just passed my mid-50s," as he puts it, Fredericks could easily be referred to as a veteran of the computer industry, programming his first mainframe when he wasn’t surfing at Wollongong beach in NSW or playing football at WIN Stadium.
"The place I worked [at council] as a trainee accountant, they were putting in a computer system so they tested the lot of us on aptitude and I made the cut. So I programmed my first computer.
"What was incredible was the computer that we had was a mainframe — it cost a lot of money, it was over $500,000. My digital camera [today] has 1000 times the amount of memory.
"You had 32Kb in this thing that was about the size of a fridge. So that’s what I’ve seen — IT came from there to where it is now," he says.
These days, Fredericks is the general manager of security-focused niche distributor Dovetail Distribution, a company that was founded by Rosser Communications’ Tim Rosser in the mid-1990s. Dovetail sells some of the biggest names in security, the likes of SonicWALL and Secure Computing products and services to a base of approximately 500 Australian resellers.
As a security-focused distributor, Dovetail ‘awakens’ resellers to the security opportunity and helps them understand the pieces they need to take it forward and sell it. "That’s our value-add, to help these guys grow," he says.
In his spare time, he has also tried his hand at pig shooting with his son at outback town Coolabah, on the way to Bourke, in western NSW. "We used to go out west pig shooting. We’re still licensed in firearms, but we haven’t been for a couple of years," he says.
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