Classic route to becoming MD

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”

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