BrazilAccenture appoints Khaled Al-Dhaher as managing director for Saudi Arabia
Accenture has appointed experienced IT business executive Khaled Al-Dhaher its new country managing director for Saudi Arabia as the firm seeks to advance its digital consulting practice in the Kingdom.
Tasked with managing operations and driving Accenture’s digital consulting strategy in the Kingdom, Khaled Al-Dhaher brings over 25 years of leadership experience to the new role, having operated in the domains of enterprise software, strategic planning, business development, strategy and strategic partnerships among others for some of the biggest tech names on the planet, serving public and private sector clients across a broad range of industries.
Al-Dhaher crosses from the managing director role he has held with Hewlett-Packard in Saudi Arabia since 2013, where he successfully expanded the business-focused HP Enterprise Group’s local market-share, prior to which he’d served in a variety of senior roles for all of Microsoft, Oracle, and AT&T in the UAE, from General Manager at Microsoft for seven years between Dubai and Riyadh, to Professional Services Manager at AT&T in Dubai.
Accenture’s regional managing director in the Middle East and Turkey, Omar Boulos, said of the appointment; “We are delighted to welcome Khaled to lead Accenture in Saudi Arabia, where we take an innovation-led approach to help our clients ‘imagine and invent’ their future now. Khaled’s wealth of experience will help us continue to deliver our promise to clients: to make them future-ready, world-class institutions and embrace the government’s transformation and innovation agenda as outlined in Saudi Vision 2030.”
In addition to his wealth of professional experience, Al-Dhaher holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, following a Masters in Computer Science & Engineering obtained in 1986 from the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Dhahran – beginning his tertiary education in the field in 1980, the year that Microsoft released its first ever operating system Xenix, which it acquired under license from AT&T.
Since earning his doctorate, Al-Dhaher has continued with his vocational development, completing an Executive Management programme with the Wharton School of Penn University, along with executive courses in Entrepreneurial Development and business-strategy related Artificial Intelligence with the Sloan School at M.I.T. – the latter topic gaining increasing traction in the consulting realm, with Sia Partners recently hosting a conference on AI for executives in Dubai, and BCG selecting the theme for its annual Middle East CEO Forum earlier this month.
Accenture, itself, is no stranger to the subject of AI in the Middle East, suggesting in a recent report that the region could boost its gross value add by nearly $400 billion by 2035 through the technology, with Saudi Arabia accounting for $215 billion of this potential at a level of economic growth described as ‘unparalleled’ by the firm’s managing director of Financial Services for the Middle East and Turkey, Amr El Saadani.
Al-Dhaher will be responsible for leading Accenture’s digital consulting strategy in Saudi Arabia at a time when competition for digital transformation and service contracts continues to heat up, with the Saudi government reportedly seeking to soon consolidate its various consulting channels into single colossal contracts, and the Big Four firm Deloitte set to establish a Digital Delivery Centre in the Kingdom with the support of the Saudi Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
On his new challenge, Al-Dhaher said; “With Accenture looking to drive digital consulting and transformation in the Kingdom, this is an exciting time to be joining this reputable company. My priority is to work closely with our clients in the public and private sectors as well as our partners in the Kingdom to create robust solutions and achieve tangible economic growth.”
