ELV and ICTsystems, fromschematic tolive operation

I hold the whole IT and ELV estate of a live container terminal — the systems that move every box across the quay, through the yard and out of the gate. That means the operational technology as well as the enterprise network: NAVIS TOS links, DGPS, gate OCR, RTG and STS crane connectivity, ship-to-shore radio and reefer monitoring, down to the crane-side cabinets and the vehicle-mount terminals in the drivers' cabs.

I delivered the terminal's Tier 3 data centre at Khalifa Port from empty room to live service — racks, UPS, cooling, containment, structured cabling, DR replication and cutover — coordinating civil, electrical, mechanical and IT contractors to a fixed date without interrupting operations.

On the operations side I replaced reactive firefighting with a structured fault-triage and preventive maintenance regime; recurring network incidents fell 30% in six months and mean time to restore came down with them. I also run the technology assessments — edge compute, AI video analytics, surveillance refresh — that decide where the next capital goes.

I ran a concurrent portfolio of ELV and ICT packages across port and terminal facilities, each with its own contractor, consultant and authority to satisfy, and brought them in inside the agreed time, cost and quality gates.

Most of the value was upstream: writing scopes of work and BOQs, chairing design reviews for security, networking and structured cabling, and closing designs against ADMCC and ISPS requirements before they reached site. Standardising the terminal ICT design assumptions — cabling routes, node room siting, camera and Wi-Fi coverage — cut procurement cycle time by a fifth and gave every later package a proven baseline to start from.

Six years delivering AV, ELV and ICT projects up to AED 8M each across hospitality, healthcare, corporate and logistics clients — VISA's CEMEA headquarters, Millennium Hotel and Noon's KIZAD warehouse among them — from design through testing, commissioning and handover, leading a team of twelve engineers and technicians. Weekly progress reviews took roughly 40% off the average punch list at handover.

The largest single facility of this period was Sharjah Airport's 108-rack Tier 3 data centre. Alongside delivery I led design to BICSI and TIA standards, qualified vendor partners that removed 15% of material cost without touching the specification, and owned technical bids for structured cabling and IoT — the estimating work that decides whether a project exists at all.

Telecom, fibre-optic, Wi-Fi and radio systems for five producing oil and gas fields — Al-Zubair, Badra CPF, Majnoon, Sohar Refinery and Lower Fars — designed on paper and then commissioned in live hazardous-area plant, which is where you learn what a drawing leaves out.

The drawing sets, specifications and BOQs I produced were adopted as the company's standard engineering templates. Before that, campus telecom and network infrastructure at Homs University, alongside teaching in the antenna and microwave engineering laboratory.