About Emircom
Technology infrastructure for the UAE and KSA, since 1984

Mohamad Abouzaki

Chief Executive Officer

Mohamad Abouzaki, known across the business as MAZ, is Chief Executive Officer of Emircom, leading the company’s operations across the GCC. He joined Emircom in 1998 and became CEO in 2017, and much of what the company is today took shape during his tenure. He is known for a steady hand: measured decisions made under pressure, and a preference for stable, organic growth over the quick win. That patience is a large part of why Emircom has held its position through difficult market cycles.

An electronics engineer by training, MAZ built his commercial instinct the direct way, working hands-on across the business from the day he joined. He rose through the ranks on performance rather than title, and that route through the company shows in how he leads: close to the detail, and credible with the teams doing the work.

His view of leadership is straightforward: he believes people are usually capable of more than their job description suggests, and that a leader’s job is to create the conditions for them to show it. He has a long record of building strong teams and getting the best from people regardless of their role or background.

In 2026, Forbes Middle East named him to its Top Tech Leaders list for the region.

Born in Lebanon, MAZ holds a degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Reading in the UK and has co-authored several business books.

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Dr. Ajayya Kumar

Chief Operating Officer

Ajayya Kumar is Chief Operating Officer of Emircom, responsible for operational excellence across the business. Under his leadership, Emircom has strengthened its position as a regional ICT leader, with disciplined internal controls and financial rigor as the foundation. His mandate is direct: build assets and revenue channels, consolidate operations across markets, and keep financial prudence at the center of how the company grows.

Colleagues describe him as equal parts strategist and operator, someone who sets direction and then gets into the detail to make it happen. His earlier work leading internal controls at Emircom, and advising senior management on strategic areas of operation, informs how he runs the business today.

Beyond the operational role, Ajayya is a published author, management thinker, art curator, and TEDx speaker. His TEDx talk on the importance of solitude in entrepreneurship has passed a million views. He has written several books on business and leadership, including Business Gita, Formula-G, and Zero to Success in 369 Days, the latter featured in Forbes India.

As founder and Chief Curator of the Sarvamangala Arts Initiative, he supports Indian classical art forms and cultural projects across the region, and through the Ajayya Bharathy Foundation he advances mindful parenting, including conclaves held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. He also hosts the Being Ajay podcast.

His contribution has been widely recognized. He was named Global Asian of the Year 2021-22 by Asia One, honored as World’s Best Emerging Business Leader 2022, and listed among EnterpriseWorld’s most influential authors to watch in 2023. In January 2026, Outlook named him among 50 visionary leaders of the $5 trillion economy.

Ajayya holds a doctorate in Management and is a qualified Cost Accountant with a Fellowship from ICMA. He lives in Abu Dhabi with his wife, Rakhi Menon, and their two daughters, Aparna and Jahnavi.

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Yusafali A

Chief Financial Officer

Yusaf leads Emircom’s finance function as Chief Financial Officer, steering the company’s financial strategy and the team behind its growth.

He joined Emircom in 2006 and has shaped its financial trajectory since, pairing close attention to detail with practical business judgment. The result is a finance function built for resilience: sound investment decisions, disciplined controls, and the stability to fund an expanding portfolio of services and markets.

His background suits a technology company. He brings a strong technical grounding and deep knowledge of the ICT sector to the role, and his influence reaches beyond the numbers into technology, corporate strategy, operations, and banking. He treats finance as a partner to the business rather than a back-office function, and he is focused on developing finance talent across the organization to support Emircom’s next stage of growth.

Before Emircom, Yusaf held a management accounting role at GAC in the UAE. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants (ACCA) in the UK and a member of the UAE Chartered Accountants (UAECA) association, and he holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the SIBER School of Management in India.

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Lerrick D’Lima

Vice President, Emircom UAE

Lerrick D’lima is Vice President of Emircom UAE, leading the company’s business and operational priorities in its largest market. His leadership is built on people. He reads them well, connects easily across professional and personal lines, and builds teams that deliver. That instinct, paired with disciplined, evidence-based decision-making, is what has carried the UAE business under his direction.

Lerrick’s career is an Emircom story. He joined in 2000 as a pre-sales executive in Abu Dhabi and rose through the company over more than two decades, becoming divisional manager for systems and security. After relocating to Dubai in 2003, he was central to reopening the Dubai branch, then went on to run it as operations manager, Regional Services Manager, and General Manager of Dubai Operations before stepping into the VP role. Few people know the business, or the market, as completely.

He backs that operational depth with formal discipline: a degree from the University of Bombay, PMP certification, ITIL training, and Six Sigma Green and Yellow Belt qualifications. The combination of instinct and method is what defines how he runs things.

Outside work, Lerrick is a committed reader of management and motivational writing, with Robert Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime among his favorites, and he is drawn to biopics, mystery films, and documentaries. He has a deep affinity for animals and wildlife, and gives his time to causes supporting children’s education and animal welfare. He lives in Dubai with his wife, Patricia, their daughter Schenelle and son Joshua, and their two dogs, Tobler and Boggy.

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Mohammed Shakeer

Vice President, Sales and Operations, Saudi Emircom

Mohammed Shakeer leads Emircom’s business in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as Vice President of Sales and Operations, with more than two decades in networking and technology behind him. A Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) since 2007, he pairs deep technical credibility with the commercial instinct to turn it into business.

Shakeer’s career began in India as a network engineer at Datacraft Asia in Hyderabad, serving clients including GE, Deloitte, HSBC, and SBI, before he moved to HSBC in Bangalore as a senior engineer running telecom and networking operations across Hyderabad, Vizag, Bangalore, and Sri Lanka. That grounding in Cisco technologies and large-scale operations is what he brought to Emircom when he joined in 2006.

At Emircom, he started as the key implementing engineer on the Mobily project in KSA, then moved through pre-sales and account management into the commercial side of the business. He was promoted to Sales Director in 2014 and later to General Manager, running the KSA branch’s profit and loss, before taking his current role. Along the way he grew the Saudi team from four people to more than two hundred.

The results back the approach. He has retained the company’s Mobily business for over 18 years, worth more than two billion Saudi Riyals, and expanded Emircom’s offering in the Kingdom well beyond core ICT into security, collaboration, networking, data, IoT, and big data, with year-on-year growth of 10 to 15% and dozens of new clients. He led the Smart Meter rollout for Saudi Electricity, one of the largest projects of its kind in the Middle East, and built partnerships with Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, and SymphonyAI. Most recently, he oversaw the launch of Emircom’s Security Operations Center in Riyadh.

Shakeer’s focus now is on moving Emircom further toward service-based, turnkey solutions and adopting emerging technologies early, so clients get outcomes rather than products.

Away from work, he is an easy person to know, with a lasting passion for cricket and music.

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Shadi Shakir Basta

General Manager, Service Provider

Shadi Shakir Basta is General Manager of the Service Provider Division at Emircom, where he leads a team of 50 service delivery professionals and owns the company’s most important service provider relationships, including Etisalat. His strength is delivery: running complex, multi-vendor projects to tight deadlines in an environment where service providers expect near-perfect execution.

Shadi’s career is an Emircom journey. He joined in 2005, an electronics and communications engineer by training, starting in the technical department at the company’s operation in Sudan. He moved into sales, relocated to the Dubai office in 2008, and took on project management for major accounts, Etisalat among them. One of those projects, a large-scale rollout delivered with Etisalat for the Abu Dhabi government, won multiple awards for the quality and timing of its execution.

That record in delivery led to his promotion to service delivery manager in Dubai, where he built the service delivery function dedicated to service providers. In 2013 he went further and created the UAE Service Provider Unit, a team designed to give critical accounts specialized attention. It has since grown into the 50-person division he runs today.

Two decades in, Shadi is known for taking on the hardest projects and untangling the most complex problems. His path through the company, across pre-sales, sales, and delivery, with exposure to finance, accounts, and logistics along the way, gives him an unusually complete view of how the business works.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Cairo, and considers Emircom something close to an extended family.

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Abdulaziz Alhalwan

General Manager, Saudi Emircom

Abdulaziz Alhalwan leads Saudi Emircom as General Manager and is the face of the company in the Kingdom.

A Saudi national with two decades in the market, he has held senior roles at VMware, where he grew public sector sales more than 130% year on year, and Cisco, where he ran a $70M+ enterprise portfolio across finance, utilities, petrochemicals, and smart cities.

He blends deep IT operations experience with a finance background spanning corporate finance, capital markets, and compliance. He holds an MS in Finance from King Saud University and a BS in Computer Engineering from KFUPM.

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