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 industry gives students the ability to learn a lot more quickly,” says Rumsey.

Moving around

Eventually Rumsey moved on to a contract role at growing telco giant Telstra, where he had to group manage X.25-based products – which was one of the fairly mainstream networking protocols before the Internet took off.

He says most early systems were using X.25 back in those days.

Six months after his contract term ended at Telstra, Rumsey accepted a position with Hutchinson Telecom, which he says “was a lot of fun”. He got to work on everything from PC Desktops, LAN and UNIX to data centre work. Rumsey also remembers his first time rolling out Hutchinson’s core network in Australia.

Rumsey was there for a good couple of years. After he finished up at Hutchinson Telecom he was offered the role of engineering technical manager at Magna Data network, where he rolled out cable network for Optus.

He then moved on to a somewhat short stint at Qala – a Singapore-based vendor.
He rolled out DSLAM in exchanges in Sydney and was gearing to do more when the Singaporean people bled the company dry of funds and it ended up bankrupt.
“The series B funding was secured but the company only had $11 million to spend (we were told we had US$120 million!). Although the company was based in Singapore, it did business in Hong Kong, Japan and China.

“The project in China was twice the size of what I had rolled out in Optus. I liked China and the Chinese people had a refreshing way of looking at things, because they weren’t afraid of picking up new technology and running with it,” he says.

Location, location, location

When he was with Qala, Rumsey had to move from Sydney to Melbourne – which proved challenging for his personal life because his wife was working for Optus in Sydney.

“The first 18 months were the most challenging because we were continually flying backwards and forwards.

“We had one place in Melbourne and a house that we both owned in Sydney and we would fly between the two to be together on weekends.

“My wife finally managed to take up a job at Telstra in Melbourne,” he recalls.

From Mozart to kung fu

While Rumsey’s IT background is purely technical, he has been able to become heavily involved in sales and marketing and is now comfortable working across both departments of an organisation.

However, he could have at any time chosen a completely different career path. Rumsey has been playing the cello and piano from a very early age because his mother was a piano teacher.

“I started learning the cello at the age of nine. It’s not that unusual because scientists believe maths and music work on the left side of the brain.

“Logical people are supposed to be very good at music and good at maths and science,” he says.

Rumsey even had a stint in the Sydney Youth Orchestra – while he was attending the Conservatorium Genius School at the Conservatorium in Sydney.

However Rumsey wanted to broaden his educational horizon and left the school to attend Sydney Grammar where he wanted to study economics, but he still continued to play in the chamber orchestra – “although playing in front of large crowds and thousands of people always gave me butterflies,” he says.

During some time off from the world of IT, Rumsey also started learning martial arts. He studied Wing Chung Kung Fu, eventually going on to teach it as well.

Rumsey also had a short stint in the Australian Army.

“I wanted to have a bit of a break and ended up going through a process of doing different things to learn about myself,” he says.

Brushing up

These days Rumsey takes it easy with the occasional game of golf and working on his Microsoft Media Center, which has three terabytes of storage with multimedia content and files from his early days.

In his spare time Rumsey is also dusting off his cello and piano to “brush up bit”