Interview: Perry Blackney, CEO at Synergy

Blackney launched his career at IBM in the early 1980s. Now he’s charged with steering an IBM integrator looking for acquisitions and a public listing.

CRN: Perry, what’s your background?

Blackney: I did a commerce degree and spent seven years at IBM [starting] back in 1980. It was a great company then and it’s still a great company today. I worked in the banking, finance and retail branch. I thought that I would be at IBM forever but after seven years I felt that I hadn’t really seen what the real world was about.

I also have a strong finance interest and background so I became a stockbroker for three years, which was a bit of a left-field sort of career to take. As part of it I spent a bit of time in London in the finance industry and came back to Australia and got heavily involved in the IT industry. I worked for Lend Lease and Computer Associates. I joined CA because they had something like 200 products and I wanted to strengthen my software background.

An opportunity came up with Intel, which had gone into a branded set of products around networking, hub, switches and routers. I went in to run that business for Intel. After six months, I ended up running the whole channel for Intel -- anything through the channel in the southern part of Australia. I’d never run a channel business before.

I did that for a year or two then Intel launched a networking business worldwide and I set that business up for Intel Australia and New Zealand. Our job here was to work with the large multinational telecom equipment manufacturers to get into their designs and also to work with the development community.

That worked well but after two years I said to Dave [Bolt] (Intel’s then country manager) that I wanted to do something different and fortunately an opportunity came up for me to be the marketing director for that Intel business in Asia-Pacific -- so I went up to Taiwan for two years. Now in Asia-Pacific that communications business this year will probably do about US$3 billion, so it’s a substantial business.


CRN: What did you do from there?

Blackney: It was always a two-year project and after two years I was going to make a decision about whether I would go and do something different at Intel, stay in Asia or come back home. When the opportunity came up with Synergy I was interested for a couple of reasons.

Number one they are an IBM partner -- and IBM-only partner -- and if I was going to work with a non-multinational I wanted to work with someone who had a strong allegiance with the market leader.

The second attraction was that Synergy has a strong culture and background. The third thing was that when I looked at their business model -- they are very well positioned in the space that they are trying to complete. We do end-to-end hardware, software and services.


CRN: Was the opportunity the result of Bill Votsaris [the former CEO] deciding to step down?

Blackney: Bill wanted to go and do more of the strategic stuff. The board felt that it would be better if he did that. Given my corporate background [I could] bring into Synergy some of the structure and discipline that I’ve learnt over the past 20 years working for companies like IBM and Intel, and to embed that into the company, because if we’re going to list [on the ASX] a whole lot of that discipline has to be in the company.

Bill doesn’t have that, he’s an entrepreneur, he’s a unique individual who has been successful as an entrepreneur but moving forward they needed someone with a more structural background who can come in and put those disciplines into the business. Bill’s skills for the business are going to be way better used doing that entrepreneurial stuff -- acquisitions, negotiations and that sort of thing.