Industry mourns loss of charismatic leader and visionary of global Australian midrange modernization firm.
Marcus Dee, one of the founding members of looksoftware, and among the most colorful and best liked technology leaders in the IBM midrange industry died Tuesday in Melbourne, Australia, after a year-long battle with cancer.
Although Dee's death was inevitable based on his prognosis, news of his passing sent ripples of shock through an aging AS/400 community whose members have seen too many high profile and energetic leaders pass away during the last two years. Dee was only 50 when he died, and he leaves behind his wife, Helen, and their four school-age children, Elizabeth, Lucy, Jacob, and Joseph, as well as his mother, Helen, and father Brian Dee.
As chief executive officer of looksoftware, Dee had a profound effect on creating a worldwide brand for the company known for its catchy logo and down-under color scheme. The firm was one of the first to embrace IBM's Rational Open Access: RPG Edition in its relentless quest to modernize clients' legacy IBM i green-screen systems. looksoftware was actually started by Brendan Kay and Gavin Rogers a few months before Dee joined them as director of sales in 1995, but he was always considered a founding partner.
"Marcus was the guy that everybody loved," said longtime friend and business associate Trevor Perry, IT consultant and COMMON director. "Even though we all knew that it was coming, at the end it was quite a bit of a shock."
Dee and Perry were close friends for 28 years having met in 1983 at a Sydney solutions provider called JBA, which was to become one of the largest midrange consulting firms in the Asia Pacific region during the 1980s.
"He taught me RPG," says Perry describing how Dee first taught himself the language after joining the firm in 1982 and then began teaching it to others. "I spent about five weeks training with Marcus and we became fast friends."
After leaving JBA, Dee went to work for Strategic Information Systems, and Perry joined him there later, both teaching RPG. Strategic was a Synon business partner, and the two men saw a potential teaching business users how to program. "We were going to teach computing to non-computing people," Perry recalls with amusement. "We had a history professor, a civil engineer, and a philosophy student, and we taught them IT. Then we taught them RPG and Synon."
Strategic became a branch of Synon in Australia, says Perry, and Dee eventually became the general manager of the Synon branch there.
In 1995 Dee teamed up with Kay and Rogers as a partner in looksoftware, and the three men made what some might think was an ideal match. With Rogers' creative technical prowess and Kay's application skills along with Dee's dynamic personality, the company grew to a worldwide staff of 25, a size that belied its large impact on today's modernization technology.
Perry had left Strategic to move to the U.S., but the two men kept in touch. "I would see Marcus every time he was in the U.S., and we'd catch up," says Perry. "He would lean on me to go to work for him, which I did in 2000 for three years full time. Since then, we've been doing projects together on and off and have worked closely together for the past 10 years in one form or another."
Until a few years ago, Dee was a smoker, and his friends used to chide him about the risks. Ironically, smoking had little or nothing to do with the skin cancer, so common in Australia, that eventually metastasized and claimed his life. Perry said an operation on a skin lesion four years ago is thought to have spread the disease throughout his system. It eventually went to his lungs and brain, and Dee underwent surgery, but it was a futile fight.
"We always gave him grief about his smoking, which he ended up stopping about three years ago for the last time," Perry said. "We kept telling him it would kill him, however, it didn't, and, as it turned out—we were wrong."
Perry said he also would tease Dee about his Australian colloquialisms including his most famous—"horses for courses."
"It means having the right horse for the right racetrack, or basically, use the right tool for the job," Perry said. "But anytime Marcus would give a talk in the U.S., I always had to explain to to people afterwards what he meant. Eventually he got it and would make a joke about it... He loved to be telling stories and connected to everybody; everyone felt comfortable around Marcus."
Dee was born Dec. 20, 1960, and he was 40 when he and wife, Helen, started a family. He was philosophical about his age when the first of four children arrived, but neither he nor his wife imagined that he would be gone before reaching his 51st birthday.
During the past year, Marcus stepped back from the business to concentrate on his health, and Brendan Kay filled in performing many of Marcus' regular duties as CEO. Paul Hodgkinson, marketing director for the company, said that Kay will continue in the role as acting CEO for the immediate future, and there are no plans at the moment to put any changes into place.
"Marcus inspired and led the company's growth into a global brand in the IBM i marketplace," said Hodgkinson. "Colleagues, partners and customers alike will remember Marcus for his vision and passion for the business and the platform. His good humor and effervescent personality will be sadly missed by the community, as will his ability to inspire and motivate those around him.
"The thoughts and prayers of all of us at looksoftware are with Marcus' family during this difficult time," said Hodgkinson.
Services are pending, but the family expressed a wish to send donations in lieu of flowers to Compassion Australia. Messages of condolence and remembrances may be left at www.marcusbdee.com.
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