Since Mohamad Al Hajjar entered the industry in the early 2011s, he has watched modest IT rooms evolve into the sophisticated AI factories that power today’s digital economy.

“I’ve been in this business for 15 years and I’ve seen it all,” says Al Hajjar, CEO of Dubai-based modern lifecycle management firm, Avar. “We started with IT rooms, moved to server rooms and data rooms, then the concept of data centers arrived. As data volumes grew, we began operating data centers, followed by colocation and hyperscale facilities. So yes – I’ve lived the whole journey.”

After earning an engineering degree in the US, Al Hajjar spent a stint simulating battery charging systems for one of the country’s largest electric car manufacturers. Yet his core focus has always been data centers, an area in which he has built his career since returning to the Middle East.

When Al Hajjar founded Avar towards the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, he was responding to a pressing need created by the late‑2010s hyperscale cloud boom in the MENA region. Dozens of new data centers were mushrooming across the Gulf. Local telcos and cloud operators were expanding capacity to meet surging data demand and latency requirements, while tech giants were rolling out hyperscale cloud regions.

“Everyone was building data centers, but who was going to operate them?” Al Hajjar recalls, adding that most players in the region were OEMs, vendors or construction firms. “Many assume that once a data center is built, operations are easy. In reality, that’s the hardest part, where all the trouble lives.”

Reducing dependency on third parties

Avar was created to fill that void and become a one‑stop shop for every service a data center needs other than the construction, with full modern lifecycle management. Although still young, the company already counts some of the region’s biggest names among its clients and maintains a presence in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey. It is now in the final stages of entering 12 additional markets across MENA, Europe Asia and Africa.

“We currently manage more than 150MW and have contracts for another 500MW in the pipeline,” Al Hajjar adds.

Avar’s innovation lies in a vertically unified business model that eliminates the traditional patchwork of subcontractors, vendors and layered KPIs. In many countries, relying on external parties creates a fragile supply chain. Vendors are often unavailable locally, and each additional contractor adds risk.

“If you subcontract most of the work, you become dependent on many parties, especially here, where vendors aren’t directly accessible,” he explains. “Avar is redefining the data center operation business by keeping everything in-house. We call it, ‘Cradle to retirement, the modern lifecycle management of data centers’”.

Operations kick off the moment the first spade hits the ground, even though Avar does not participate in the actual construction – the only stage of a data center’s lifecycle it intentionally skips. Instead, Al Hajjar’s team spends roughly 18 months preparing for the new facility’s technical requirements, using that lead time to anticipate upcoming technology shifts.

About six months before the building is completed, Avar steps in during testing and commissioning, a service also provided in-house and then assumes the handover to begin its managed operations phase.

AI-driven preventive maintenance

Avar handles every single aspect of the data center management in‑house: from testing and commissioning to ongoing operations, physical security, soft services and AI‑enhanced operations and maintenance. Critical maintenance is another function Al Hajjar deliberately kept internal, partnering with top-tier OEMs to reduce external dependencies.

“We start at L1 testing all the way to L5,” explains Al Hajjar. “We test each equipment component and then integrate them for final testing. We also do the commissioning handover and the snagging work before taking over the operations – everything in-house, even the load banks are all Avar equipment.”

A sustainability division ensures that every facility runs efficiently. All his operated data centers achieve a highly efficient PUE of 1.5 (Power Usage Effectiveness), and the team continuously audits each site for further gains. Al Hajjar says that sustainability is woven into every department, from finance and HR to technicians, all company staff receive in‑house training on energy‑efficient practices. But he stresses that client cooperation is essential.

“I’m fortunate to work with clients who share this vision,” he says. “No matter how well we operate, if a data center was built inefficiently, there’s only so much we can do.”

The company has developed a proprietary AI software that drives preventive, prescriptive and predictive maintenance across its data centers, assisting for much more efficient operations and leveraging data-driven insights to reduce downtime.

"This is the cherry on the top," says Al Hajjar. "Our own brand Lyric Logic is currently under the learning period and will be ready for takeover very soon. We are able to feed it with huge amounts of data from our locations. It’s a project we are working on and investing heavily in."

Skilling the future workforce

Clients stay with Avar because of its unwavering track record of 100 percent availability, safety and reliability, supported by three years of flawless performance, Al Hajjar says. By keeping critical systems and maintenance internal, Avar meets ultra‑tight SLAs, responding within five minutes and completing repairs in under 30 minutes, a speed many once deemed impossible.

“There’s nothing impossible,” Al Hajjar asserts. “Our mean time to repair on any system is less than 30 minutes. That’s a company set target that we were able to achieve.”

To sustain this record and the company’s growth, Avar launched an in‑house academy to train the next generation of data center talent. Al Hajjar estimates the company will need roughly 500 new employees each year for the next three years, but qualified candidates are scarce.

“The data center business is relatively new, and talent isn’t readily available,” he explains. “Our academy and lab, built with international standards institutes, hires fresh graduates and trains them for one to two years. We have the resources, the know‑how, and most importantly, the actual data center environment to give them hands-on experience.”

Current cohorts are already training on live facilities, and the academy collaborates with OEM partners to send teams abroad for additional hands‑on learning. This heavy investment in talent is crucial for Avar’s global expansion and for achieving Al Hajjar’s ambition to make Avar the benchmark for digital reliability in the region.

“I want Avar to be the reference point for data center services globally, 'the genericized name for modern lifecycle management of a data center'. That's where we’re headed.”

To find out more about Avar, visit avarglobal.com.