Classic route to becoming MD

Despite a deep love of classical music and martial arts, Jules Rumsey, managing director of ICT service provider Telarus, plans on sticking with his current telco gig for a while yet.

Rumsey has been in his current position as managing director for
the past three years, although he has been with the company for a total of five years.

“I merged my company Telarus with Broadband Direct in 2002. Graeme Smith – who was running Broadband Direct – and I met on a fairly regular basis. We decided to set up a company that combined voice and data services and data centre capabilities – the two companies were complementary to each other,” he says.

The combined company, now running as Telarus, offers telecommunications services with a broad mix of products from major carriers. It also carries traditional fixed line voice products and a mix of services rebuilt around Telstra’s access and direct access services.

Internet revolution

Telarus’ go-to-market scheme is a blend of direct and indirect sales.
The telco has about 40 channel partners.

However, Rumsey says if both the company and a partner are pitching to the same customer, the telco will always “step back in favour of its channel partner”.

Rumsey is now an IT&T veteran – his career spans 15 years and he still has a 1200/7.5Mb/s acoustic coupler modem, which is “only good for text”. He can also remember when households only had dial phones that were attached to the handsets and users were lucky to be able to attach extra handsets to the phone lines.

He believes the proliferation of Internet technology, like the HTTP protocol, has revolutionised the way people interact.

“Prior to the WWW, there was something called Gopher, which only brought up a text-based screen. Multimedia capabilities really got things started and the interface became so much easier to view online,” he says.

Back in the day

Rumsey says previously networks were IT-specific and not something you got into at a home level. With the mass use of PCs and the Internet in most homes, IT has changed the way people ‘Live Work and Play’ – according to the Cisco saying, he says.

He believes IT is now a vehicle for all types of work. Take the changes in cash registers, he says – from being a mechanically-driven device to something that is now computerised.

Rumsey’s interest in computers and IT started at the age of nine, when his dad, an AWA electrical engineer, bought him his first Apple 2E computer with 64K of RAM. As a child he loved to play around with technical products and once he got the Apple he started teaching himself soft coding.

He then progressed to an early IBM PC and continued to do coding. Rumsey’s first IBM had 10MB of storage – these days, he notes, users wouldn’t be happy with a mobile phone “having that much storage”.

After high school he attended the University of Sydney where he studied a mix of subjects including maths, science, philosophy, psychology, computing science and physics.

One door closes, another opens

In between his studies a tragic event made Rumsey take time off from studying to explore other options.

“My 20-year-old sister died in my second year at uni. Things started to become a little odd so I decided to take a break from studying and took up some contract work with the Sydney Institute of Technology doing PC help desk work,” he says.

The work eventually led to more of a network administration role and Rumsey worked on VAX systems, which where early, sizeable computers.

He never went back to university to finish off his degree, although there are times when he thinks about it; now he would much rather complete an MBA.
Rumsey says his career has been progressive: most of the stuff he has done cannot be learnt at university.

“The real technical work is only something you learn outside of school. Moving straight into the

becoming classic collaboration md networking route to