Changes – I’ve seen a few

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.

 

Fredericks has seen many sides of the IT industry since entering it all those years ago. He worked at the council until the late 1970s when he moved out of a technical role and into sales. "I figured they never made general managers out of IT managers, they made them out of salesmen," he says.

"I decided to get into sales. And then through a couple of small IT companies, I got a job at Toshiba in the early 1980s."

Fredericks grabbed the role of general manager at Toshiba’s IT division in 1982. "I basically started the IT division. I brought the first laptop into the country — I carried it in, the first evaluation unit," he recalls.

He left Toshiba in 1987 and landed a job at Sun Microsystems as national sales manager and then sales director at the company.

He joined Sun at a time of massive growth. "The year before I started at Sun, it had done $9 million [in revenues] and the year I left, we’d just completed a $64 million year and were on track for a $120 million year."

Fredericks attributes Sun’s massive growth to its ability to take the Sun OS Unix operating system out of the ‘research-type technical environment’ and into the Australian banking and finance sector.

"We took it into banking and finance, which was a big achievement through that period selling to people like Macquarie Bank. And Sun just had a great story — a great philosophy of open systems.

"Customers could see the benefit of not being locked in as they had been through that mainframe and mini-computer era where you went with a supplier: you had their operating system, software — you couldn’t do anything. They [Sun] were the [open standards] pioneer."

Fredericks followed with stints at Star Micronics as general manager and Australasian Memory — prior to the latter going out of business in 1998. He held several sales roles at the likes of Cincom, storage vendor StorageTek and distributor Unixpac before Dovetail founder Rosser asked Fredericks to join the company as general manager in 2003.

The security market was of particular interest to Fredericks, who says it offers a good opportunity for growth.

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