Changes – I’ve seen a few

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.