Technology top of mind for Kent Dapiere

Netgear's business development manager is a former psychology student and PC assembler

By Hamish Barwick, Auckland | Thursday, 11 March 2010
Kent Dapiere originally set his sights on a career in human resources, but took small steps on the path to IT by building PCs to finance the psychology studies he undertook to pursue HR.

Other than a couple of commerce papers alongside his psychology classes at Canterbury University, Dapiere didn’t complete any IT training. He has stayed away from PC assembly since leaving the university, saying, “there are some fantastic resellers out there that are much better at building PCs than me”.

However, he would later land a role as a data representative with Vodafone, which led to the more traditional channel career path of distribution and a transition to vendor land.

On completing university studies, Dapiere started in export air freight at Mainfreight in Christchurch, followed by a data representative role with Firstmobile, a division of Vodafone. His territory covered the whole of the South Island.

‘The first step towards working at Vodafone was quite exciting. I had friends who worked in the business in Christchurch and they were always well looked after.”

The role involved training store staff and offering them backup support at a business development level. One of the enjoyable aspects of the job was supporting the selling of the early local Blackberry models.

Although Dapiere enjoyed his foray into data and IT, he took a year out of the industry when he bid farewell to the South Island in 2003 to work for a customer he had sold air freight to - Boschman car audio in Auckland.

However, after a year in the role he moved to stationery and Canon supplier Sera Brands, which sold to companies such as Warehouse Stationery.

Sera Brands was bought by Absolute Home Entertainment and from there he moved to Softprint Interactive, the distributor that went into liquidation in 2008. It was there that he made what would prove to be a career-changing business relationship.

“At Softprint I looked after a handful of brands including Netgear, so it was there I first developed a relationship with [Netgear ANZ managing director] Ryan Parker.”

In 2008, he made the move to a larger distributor, Ingram Micro, subsequently joining Netgear in October of that year.

“It was an exciting challenge. Working for a vendor is something I have wanted to do for a number of years since joining Softprint. Having the chance to achieve that is quite rewarding.”