Track record
Twenty-five years in enterprise technology. Twelve of them living and working in the Gulf. Every role below was held on payroll, with a number attached, in a market I did not grow up in.
Employers are named on my LinkedIn profile and on request. Here I'm more interested in what each role actually required.
An Italian enterprise AI group · Saudi Arabia and the UAE
Built the Saudi and Emirati business from zero to a €10M+ multi-sector pipeline in eighteen months.
What it required First, credibility from nothing. An Italian AI company with no Saudi brand, no local entity, and no reference customer in the region. Before a single commercial conversation could happen, someone had to make the company real to people who had never heard of it. That is not a marketing problem — it is eighteen months of showing up with something specific to say.
Then, mapping who could actually stop it. The work ran into national transformation programmes across water, healthcare and chemicals, and into the ecosystems around the region's largest technology and investment groups. In that environment the commercial buyer is rarely the decision. Every deal had a stakeholder who could stop it and who never appeared on the account plan — a regulator, a shareholder's shareholder, a ministry that had not been consulted.
Then, converting access into pipeline. A memorandum signed at a bilateral business forum is a press release until someone owns what happens on the Monday after. The signing was the easy part.
Proves the commercial role, the regional role, and the argument that access without accountability produces nothing.
A UAE state-linked telecommunications group · United Arab Emirates
AED 150M+ pipeline. Led a major ride-hailing acquisition's post-acquisition integration of digital services.
What it required Two companies, one number, and nobody's incentives pointing the same way.
An integration is where general management stops being an abstraction. The commercial models did not match. The systems did not match. One organisation moved at the speed of a technology company and the other at the speed of a national operator, and both were right about their own market. Nothing in that job was solved by selling harder. It was solved by deciding, repeatedly and in public, which of two reasonable positions the combined business was going to take — and then owning the consequence when one side lost the argument.
The other half of the education was internal. In a state-linked incumbent, the hardest stakeholder map you will build is your own employer's.
Proves the regional and general-management role. The closest one on this page to running a business rather than a territory.
A US network-security vendor · MEA region
Grew regional revenue from $50K to $3M+ in twelve months — first in MEA, second globally. Built one of the largest CPE firewall managed-security programmes in the world.
What it required Leverage, not effort. You cannot grow a territory sixty-fold by working more hours. You do it by building something that keeps working when you are not in the room — in that case a partner and managed-service motion where the product stopped being a box someone bought and became a service someone else operated at scale. That is the same principle a fractional engagement runs on: a senior person is worth hiring part-time only if what they build outlasts the days they are present.
Translation. The channel only scaled because someone reconciled an American vendor's model with how the region actually buys. Head office wanted a forecast on the last Tuesday of the quarter. The region wanted a relationship that would still be there in five years. My job was to make both of those true at once, without lying to either.
Proves the commercial role, the security role, and the operating logic of the fractional model itself.
Digital-identity, secure-credential and digital-security manufacturers · Italy, Southern and Eastern Europe, Middle East
Key account, technical account and programme leadership across a $20M+ EMEA portfolio; then multi-country sales management across South and Eastern Europe and the Middle East at 20% average year-on-year growth over six years; then mobile-operator key accounts through to 2018.
What it required Being early, repeatedly, in places where early is expensive.
The first commercial eSIM launch in the Middle East. The first TDMA-to-GSM migration for a major Gulf operator. 3G launches across EMEA. First-of-kind work has no reference customer by definition — you are asking a risk-averse buyer to be the proof. That is a different sale from any other, and it is the one most foreign vendors are actually making when they arrive in a new region without knowing it.
These eighteen years are also where the European half of this practice comes from. Southern and Eastern Europe were a territory I carried, not a language I speak.
Proves the Europe half of the three-region claim, and a two-decade pattern of launching what has not been launched there before.
Credentials
CISSP. Aeronautical Engineer. Executive MBA, University of Bologna. I work in English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
What isn't here yet
Client outcomes from this practice. It's new, and I'd rather show you an empty space than someone else's results with the names changed. When the first engagement closes and the client is willing, it goes here, dated. Until then: everything above was held on payroll, and every employer is named on LinkedIn.
The first conversation is a conversation, not a pitch. Tell me which role is open and what has to be true in six months.
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