Eng. Maqbool Al Wahaibi: Revolutionizing Oman’s IT Services

Founded in 2012, Oman Data Park SAOC (ODP) is the Sultanate’s premier I.T. Managed and Cloud Service Provider, 100% owned subsidiary of Omantel. ODP offers a TIA 942 rated 3 certified data center providing cyber security managed Data Centre and cloud services. Currently, ODP offers cost-effective and secure solutions to over 800 government, corporate, and SME organizations.

With a vision to make ICT services available on demand, ODP currently serves more than 500 local and international corporates, starting from small and mid-tier to large companies. With its secure and cost-effective IT services, ODP is fully prepared to serve government, corporate, and SME entities operating both locally and internationally.

Over the last decade, ODP has won numerous awards, including Best Digital Data Centre in the Middle East at the Telecom World Middle East Awards 2019, Best Datacenter and Cyber Security awards COMEX 2021, and the Best Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) Award 2019.ODP has also been recognized as VeeaM VCSP Partner for 2020, Cisco Partner of the Year 2020, and Fortinet Cloud MSSP 2020.

Leading the Charge

Eng. Maqbool Al Wahaibi presently serves as the CEO of Oman Data Park, the premier Managed & Cloud IT Services Provider in Oman. He is a part of the Executive Management and Founding team that established ODP. Maqbool has played a contributory role in evolving solutions explicitly tailored to address the needs of banks, financial institutions, oil and gas companies, healthcare, education, government, and professional service sectors. Maqbool is an industry veteran with over two decades of experience in software development, ICT engineering, business startup, and leadership. He has pursued his Master’s Degree in Computer Software Engineering from the University of York, and an MBA from Strathclyde University, UK.

His vision is to make ODP as one of the world’s top 10 Managed Service Providers by 2025, this vision has driven the company from its humble beginnings to receiving industry accolades. Under Maqbool’s leadership, ODP has transformed itself from offering bare metal servers to a full-fledged Data Center within a decade.

The Inception Story

Forming a company in a traditional market is certainly not an easy affair by any means, which pushed Maqbool to start various things in parallel to maximize shareholder value.  -. At that same point, Maqbool was able to capture a wonderful opportunity to position ODP’s services and secure a deal with Bank Nizwa, the first Islamic bank in Oman, The was the first huge step in transforming the dynamics of change for MSP and Cloud solutions.

“It made a lot of sense to convince the Bank to build a Data Center and collocate all of their Infrastructure in ODP; it was an opportunity we didn’t want to miss.“- states Maqbool.

However, dealing with statutory and security components was not so easy. ODP had to present the case to the concerned statutory bodies and challenge the bank’s risk and security departments before discussing the benefits the Bank would enjoy by creating its IT core infrastructure in ODP, which was entirely unparalleled in the region.

Diversified Offerings

While securing the deal with Bank Nizwa, Maqbool understood limiting ODP’s offerings only to colocation services won’t help the company earn a quick ROI. So, ODP’s team assembled the company’s first Cloud Stack to provide cloud services for its clients along with the existing colocation service. This was a blue ocean strategy executed by Maqbool, who himself wasn’t sure about the market’s reaction, as no one had done this in Oman previously.

However, the cloud server selling was quite promising, and things started to roll without many setbacks, which gave the team some confidence about the market’s enthusiasm. Soon, it started concentrating on augmenting ODP’s IaaS offering by introducing a range of Cloud Stacks that provides IaaS in different flavors to satisfy diverseclients’ needs.

Contemporarily, data security had always been a top priority for Maqbool to keep ODP’s Data Center and clients well secure as per the banking mandate. A few years ago, in 2015, ODP also started to provide Cyber Security services to its clients, transforming it from a cost center, focused only on securing ODP DC to a profit center securing its clients.

Maqbool states, “Every client we were onboarding had their own set of security and service level requirements, which made adhering to them a step forward towards maturity. For example, getting one of top tier Oil and Gas companies like Occidental pushed us one step forward in maturity where we have to satisfy all of the required technical and business requirements, especially from the resource skill sets perspective.”

With its Colocation, IaaS, and Cyber Security services, the organization additional started to diversify into offering Platform as an IT Services or PaaS, Software as a Service or SaaS and launched its first cloud marketplace in 2016, where the clients can easily subscribe to the firm’s services online and get provisioned automatically.

Leadership Principles

Focus, passion, perseverance, discipline, and avoiding procrastination together has contributed to Maqbool’s success. Driven by the desire to be one among the leaders of digital transformation and digital economy in Oman and the region, he always emphases on his goals and tries not to allow anything to deviate him.

Inside ODP, Maqbool is not a time teller but a clock builder. He invests his time in setting the process, recruiting the right people, ensuring the team communicates with each other, and leading them towards ODP’s vision.

He says, “I don’t like micro-management, and I tend to empower my team. If someone turned out that he/she is not for the job, I make them choose between uplifting their skillset, and we invest on that as an organization, or they can seek other opportunities where they can shine better.”

Obsessed with quality and customer satisfaction, nothing makes Maqbool’s day better than a client who speaks highly about ODP’s team and appreciates the value they are getting from the company’s services. Focused on bringing value to shareholders and the market and building businesses that can exist forever, Maqbool sees himself as a long-term infinite leader executing beyond the short-term business and profitability margins.

Tackling Failures and Success

Maqbool believes that in the early stages of ODP’s journey, he concentrated more on the market rather than the aspect of cash flow. He thought that the finance team would thoroughly look after that aspect and missed their alerts until realizing that ODP was facing a cash crunch that could restrict the firm from paying salaries. Maqbool couldn’t imagine the scenario and spent several sleepless nights until he managed to sort out the situation by requesting shareholders to inject some capital. In the end, he believes this situation taught him the hard way that he needs to be attentive toward every aspect of the company.

Earl Nightingale once quoted, “Success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”

For Maqbool, success is a defined goal with a clear path to achieve it. He feels it’s a continuous process and every milestone in the journey toward the definite purpose and goal is a success. This not only makes him successful but happy, and appreciate what he does.

As ODP’s leader, Maqbool wants to establish an academy to help kids with the necessary skill set and education in AI and Cloud. He says, “Kids love technology, and they get attracted to them; we need to guide them towards the things they can do with technology, like the metaverse world, robotics, Internet of things, and gaming. This would allow them to dream big and innovate for the future.”

Picture of the Future

Over the last decade, and with over 600 organizations that ODP has been serving, has successfully gained a great deal of experience in rendering cloud-managed services. With an idea to share this understanding with various other markets in the region, ODP is well prepared to enter markets in GCC and the African continent, where its service could bring a lot of value from the managed-service offerings.

“We will be either constructing DCs in multiple locations around the globe or working with local DC or Internet Service Providers (ISP) in multiple countries to channel ODP cloud and cyber security offerings in multiple market segments.“- says Maqbool.