Senior Executive - Platforms
Dubai Holding Entertainment
Total years of experience :18 years, 1 Months
Managing and ensuring availability of backbone ticketing applications such as Embed, SnApp (VGS) and Vista.
• Supporting yearly budget exercises ensuring all the critical Opex and Capex elements of the business are captured.
• Custodian of all licenses, vetting AMC’s, contract documents and vendor contacts to ensure prompt support.
• Participating in IT systems audit, reviewed audit comments and provided solutions and recommendations.
• Working closely with Business units, IT Infrastructure & Corporate IT Projects team and ensured smooth
handover.
• Adhering to Corporate IT policies & procedures with regards to IT infrastructure, Backups, System / Database
Administration, System Security, Data security and Enterprise architecture.
Key Projects
Ain Dubai, Bluewater Island
• Headed the IT program for the Ain Dubai project. Liaison point interface between Business, Procurement,
Finance and other stakeholders. Reporting to the Program Manager.
• Key stakeholder in Procurement related activities including technical evaluation of vendors and interviews.
• Worked closely with the business to gather product requirements that are to be sold across various sales
channels and ensure that the same was reflected in the ticketing environment for the business to test.
• Conducted customer journey workshops with major stakeholders in the business ensuring that the
products/tickets created are in accordance with what has been agreed.
• Facilitated the test environment for key stakeholders to enable them to test their products and functionalities
prior to going live.
• Conducted weekly meetings with key vendors on the status of their respective areas concerning the project.
Datacenter migration of Cinema Application
• Orchestrated migration of Cinema application with meticulous planning hence reducing the total time taken
for migration of over a month to less than a month.
• Coordination with the various stakeholders from the Corporate IT team ensuring the right team members are
assigned for the various activities.
• Ensured minimal impact to the operations and the business for the whole duration of the migration thus
getting the business ready just in time for the peak season of the year.
• Managed a 5-member team to support the Leisure and Entertainment business and its various assets.
• Training the team and ensuring that the team were certified by the vendor to operate the ticketing application,
SnApp.
• Supporting yearly budget exercises ensuring all the critical Opex and Capex elements of the business are
captured.
• Managing and ensuring availability of backbone ticketing applications such as Embed/SnApp/Vista.
• Custodian of all licenses, vetting AMC’s, contract documents and vendor contacts to ensure prompt support.
• Participating in IT systems audit, reviewed audit comments and provided solutions and recommendations.
• Working closely with Business units, IT Infrastructure & Corporate IT Projects team and ensured smooth
handover.
• Adhering to Corporate IT policies & procedures with regards to IT infrastructure, Backups, System / Database
Administration, System Security, Data security and Enterprise architecture.
Key Projects
Laguna Water Park, La Mer
• Served as the liaison point for the IT Team to ensure that business requirements are translated to the
Corporate IT Team in terms of Application and Infrastructure to be implemented in the park.
• Coordinating between vendors and key business stakeholders, managing all project deliverables, budgets and
procurement, evaluating infrastructure robustness.
• Creating tickets/products on VGS SnApp platform according to the requirements from the business.
Roxy Cinemas, La Mer and Al Khawaneej
• Represented the Corporate IT Team to ensure the apt transition of business requirements to the Corporate IT
stakeholders. This was critical in ensuring full understanding of the right application logic and infrastructure to
be implemented in the cinemas.
• Ensuring full stakeholder engagement, tracking milestones, and ensuring all functions were tested and made
live as per communicated deadlines.
• Overseeing the configuration of the servers and ensuring their availability for testing by the business, as well as
the configuration of ticket types, price cards, and other essential features for the cinema.
• Coordinating with the vendors of ticket dispensing kiosks and ensuring their payment devices are fixed and
made available before the deadline.
Migration of critical ticketing applications, Vista and SnApp (VGS) to cloud
• Business case preparation and presentation to the business with key highlights on the benefits, efficiency gains
thus aligning with the Corporate vision of moving to cloud.
• Re-designed the architecture aligning with the recommendations from the vendors and the industry best
practices.
• Project plan preparation aligning key stakeholders on the timelines and getting business sign-off
• Ensuring vendor availability and liaising with them on the completion of the project within the timelines agreed.
• Managed an 8-member operations team to support all group entities during business hours and holidays.
• Prepared a retail IT operations strategy to align with the retail management MBO’s and KPI’s.
• Maintained a scalable and resilient enterprise architecture comprising 50+ Servers offering high availability
across 300+ Hardware Units & Mobile / Web Apps complete with a disaster recovery and business continuity
plan.
• Effectively managed retail IT Budgets valued at AED 1M, encompassing manpower planning and scheduling.
Key Projects
• Implementation of Digital Assets across all Emaar Entertainment attractions.
• Implemented Digital Assets across Dubai Ice Rink, Dubai Aquarium & Underwater Zoo (DAUZ) & KidZania.
Notable projects are Guinness Record holding OLED at DAUZ, 190m 2 LED at Ice Rink, LED Displays at KidZania.
• Implementation of Digibox (self-service kiosks) across all attractions in Emaar Entertainment
Significant Accomplishments:
• Awarded Best Support of the Year in 2012 for delivering excellent performance in providing system support.
• Team Leader in upgrading 70 workstations from Windows XP to Windows 7 within a span of 4 months.
• Instrumental in reducing the backup duration from 15-16 hours to 9-11 hours that resulted in reducing
recovery time in case of major downtime with critical servers as well as eliminated bottlenecks in backup
operations.
• Decreased the firms carbon footprint by promoting employee awareness on paper wastage.
• Implemented MPS (Managed Print Services project) and installed MFD’s (Multi-Functional Devices) that
eliminated the need of over 70 desktop printers and 20-25 fax machines across over 20 branches.
• Streamlined toner management and printer repairs by implementing Print Audit system (SafeQ).
• Implemented Helpdesk Management System that streamlined emails/request sent to the IT Department