After 50 years, Gary Jackson calls stumps

Gary Jackson is calling it quits on his 50-year career. One of the stalwarts of the Australian IT industry, and currently JAPAC VP for Tenable, he is the former APAC boss for companies like Cisco, EMC, Aruba, Force10 Networks.

He was also the Australian managing director of companies like Microsoft and Sybase.

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50 years ago Billy McMahon was the Australian Prime Minister and Richard Nixon was the US President.

As he noted on a Linkedin post, the first computer Jackson sold "... had a "massive" 64k bytes of memory! And 1200 BITS per second was the dial-up speed for communications."

He noted that at the time there was "No social media, no Internet, no mobile phones and integrated circuits [were]  just emerging. No Apple, no Microsoft, no Cisco."

Jackson was one of the most high profile leaders of the IT sector at a time of huge growth during the 1990s and early 2000s before heading offshore.

An outspoken character at times, his career was not without controversy, in particular his stint at Microsoft which was cut short following the return of Redmond's golden-haired boy Daniel Petrie.

However, that setback proved merely a blip as he went on to lead companies such as Sybase, Cisco and EMC in their fast growth glory days. (This was also a time when he was rumoured to have the largest installed base of Maseratis in Australia, which for a very short time he couldn't actually enjoy after losing his licence for speeding.)

In his Linkedin post, Jackson wrote, "My 50-year career has been a wonderful mixture, some tough times, like anyone, but so much to look back on with pride. I have never accepted settling for average. Have been prepared to take hopefully smart risks, to shut up and listen before deciding, to be confident but humble and not afraid to make tough calls."

"Get noticed yes, absolutely, but set your own bar high so that getting noticed is a positive not a negative. I also am a big practiser of brutal honesty. We need the harsh truth often, not political BS that often unfortunately prevails. Hopefully, this has earned the respect of the team around me."

Jackson once told me that when he retired he planned to set up a restaurant in Cairns (this was at the end of a particularly long lunch). However as to what actually comes next, "This new chapter of my life will not involve sitting in a chair smoking a cigar (well sometimes probably). I’ll be taking on advisory roles with earlier-stage organisations in APAC and dedicating more time to charities and my family."