Leadership

Rashid Al-Naimi

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Vice President Administration, Qatar Foundation

Having served as Chairman since MEEZA's launch in 2008, Rashid Al Naimi, also the CEO, carries with him a vast portfolio of responsibilities and operational functions managing the company’s growth from a maturing enterprise to a world-class IT services provider. Rashid’s inspirational leadership and long industry tenure oversees MEEZA's substantial investments in the areas of Data Centres, Managed Services and Cloud offerings; ensuring MEEZA's continued advancement is aligned with the State of Qatar’s vision and future plans. Additionally, being the VP of Administration at Qatar Foundation, his role covers the shared services area of Finance, Procurement, Information Technology, Human Resources, Support Services, Business Improvement and Quantity Management Systems.

Rashid Al-Naimi’s breadth of experience encompasses a wide spectrum of the business lifecycle from conception, to production, from supply chain, to delivering cost effective world-class products and services. He holds an outstanding record for performance in delivering successful restructuring and turn-around programmes by creating team-oriented environments that focus on continuous improvement to increase shareholder value.

Ghada P. El-Rassi

Deputy Chief Executive Officer
& Acting Chief Operating Officer

As Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Ghada is responsible for facilitating process innovation, strategic planning, competitive analysis and other corporate initiatives for MEEZA’s executive team and the office of the Chairman.

Ghada has over 17 years of experience working with ERP software systems. In building her professional career, she has gained specialist business and technical experience which is leveraged to help build and maintain well-structured, agile and dynamic environments with clear guidelines and procedures.

Ghada also develops and promotes effective and efficient communication channels within corporations to achieve sustainable synergies among individual staff members and across teams.

Ian Cannell

Chief Financial Officer

As the Chief Financial Officer at MEEZA, Ian Cannell brings with him considerable commercial experience from multinational companies. He has held the position of Qatar Foundation’s Financial Director since September 2006 and has been promoted to Chief Financial Officer in June 2009.

Ian has worked in senior capacities in a number of organizations including Rolls Royce, Mobil Oil Corporation and ExxonMobil. He has worked in the Middle East since 1984 and has been involved in start-ups of major "grass roots" Joint Venture Projects and expansions with partners including SABIC and Sandi Aramco. His depth of experience is extensive and is not limited to only finance - covering feasibility, legal, contracts/JV negotiations, company restructuring etc. He has also acted as a Company Officer of a world scale Joint Venture Refinery in Saudi Arabia as Company Secretary to the Board of Directors as well as CFO. More recently he has worked with the United Offsets Group (UOG) in Abu-Dhabi, conducting a full due diligence and restructuring exercise on an intended acquisition.

He holds an Honours Degree in Mathematics, a Post Graduate Diploma in Management and is a Chartered Management Accountant from the UK.

Jean-Philippe Sohier

Chief Marketing Officer

Jean-Philippe leads the Sales and Marketing teams at Meeza. He is also responsible for defining and implementing MEEZA’s presence across the MENA region.

He brings with him 25 years career of complex solutions sales, sales and general management in the IT services, telecom and software area. In addition, he brings significant European and multicultural experience with an excellent track record in building and executing business across multiple countries. He has experience working with infrastructure managed and cloud services, security services, databases, datacentres, servers, storage, network, virtualization, IT Consolidation, IT Rationalization, IT Transformation, Grid extension and Grid computing.

In his last role, Jean-Philippe was Vice-President Strategic Programmes at COLT Technology Services where he held several senior executives level positions including Business Development & Capacity Management Director Europe driving the Managed Services Business across 13 countries. Prior to joining COLT, he worked for Cambridge Technology Partners, Atos-Origin and France Telecom.

Fadi Nasser

Chief Alliances Officer

Fadi is responsible for MEEZA's ecosystem development, partnerships and joint venture alliances. He started his career working for Nortel Networks and Alcatel in North America. Fadi has a long track record in telecom, networking, wireless and virtualization companies across the Silicon Valley. A founding member in a number of successful hi-tech start-ups, he is passionate about technology and risk management, delivering quality and value to the end user.

Prior to joining MEEZA, Fadi was responsible for the product line management of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform at VMWare. His experience spans hands-on engineering through strategic advising and executive product marketing positions. Fadi has a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering and Masters in Business and Engineering management.

Chris Hazel

Chief Information Officer

Chris is an evolutionary CIO who is able to translate business driven strategic goals into IT deliverables which enable MEEZA to capitalise on its value of investment, providing the best possible experience for its clients. He has a passionate belief in service orientated delivery as opposed to legacy driven technology alignment ensuring IT Services meet business demand.

Chris has over twenty years in the IT industry which started in the British Armed Forces followed by roles at Cap Gemini in Operations management at the London Stock Exchange. Chris went on to hold senior management roles at VOCALINK, the world’s busiest financial payment network, before leading several Consultancy engagements in MENA with a global IT services consultancy before joining MEEZA in 2009.

Faisal Al Kuwari

Chief Technical Officer

Faisal is an experienced and innovative CTO with a proven track record in creating technology designs that deliver strategically aligned results. He is able to deliver leading edge technology transformations from proof of concept to product realization through agile management practices. Faisal heads up the MEEZA service portfolio design and architecture teams driving service excellence for clients.

Faisal has over fourteen years experience in IT at leading Commercial and Government entities like the Ministry of Education and Qatar Gas. He later held multiple supervisory and management roles at KAHRAMAA in IT Operations and Systems Support until appointed Head of Networking and Telecoms. Before joining MEEZA in 2010, Faisal led the managed services product development at QTEL.

Tajedin Idris Babekir

Head of Legal

Tajedin Babekir is the Head of Legal of MEEZA. In this role, Taj works to enable the organisation to identify and appropriately manage all legal risks associated with the business and to ensure full compliance with the laws and regulations in all legal issues.

Taj brings more than 14 years of solid experience in Corporate Law, Commercial Law and Intellectual Property Law as well as extensive experience in litigation characterised by front and senior positions in top law firms.

Before joining MEEZA, Taj worked at several Law Firms as attorney and legal counsel where he handled complex transactions, drafted and reviewed agreements and documents of a legal nature.

Taj holds LL.B and LL.M degrees.