SCC Middle East has appointed Shams Hasan as Vice President of Sales, hiring the executive who led VAST Data's Middle East, Turkiye and Africa business as the United Kingdom technology group accelerates a regional build that began only this year. The appointment was announced on 30 September 2026.
SCC Middle East is the regional arm of SCC, the privately and family owned United Kingdom technology group that has traded for more than 50 years and is described as one of Europe's largest independent technology solutions and services organisations. The regional business launched its United Arab Emirates headquarters in Dubai in June 2026 and sells across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud, data and mission critical infrastructure to government, critical industries and large enterprise.
Hasan joins from VAST Data, where he most recently led sales and strategy across the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa and was part of the regional leadership team that built that business from the ground up. Before VAST Data he held senior roles with Dell Technologies in the United Kingdom and across the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa, where he fronted the company's Realizing 2030 research in the region. He holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an MBA from Columbia Business School with Dean's Honors, and an MBA from London Business School with Distinction.
Hasan said the combination of scale and independence was what attracted him. "What drew me to SCC is a combination that is genuinely quite rare," he said. "There is more than 50 years of experience behind the business, but it remains independent and family owned." On the mandate itself he was direct: "My focus is straightforward: get in front of the right organisations, deliver sales growth and turn the opportunity we see across the region into long-term customer relationships."
Daniel Valle, Chief Executive Officer of SCC Middle East, put the emphasis on sequencing. "The timing of this appointment is important for us," he said. "We are building the business quickly, but we also want to build it properly and around people who genuinely understand this market."
James Rigby, Executive Chairman of SCC, linked the approach to the group's ownership. "Being a family-owned business shapes the way we think about growth," he said. "We have been building SCC for more than 50 years and that naturally gives you a different perspective."
The appointment is a readable signal about how European integrators are entering the Gulf. Government and sovereign artificial intelligence programmes across the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have created demand for partners who can deliver data centre grade infrastructure alongside security and cloud, and that work is won on existing relationships with a small number of very large buyers. Recruiting from a storage vendor that had itself built a regional business from nothing, rather than from another integrator, buys SCC the account map and the technical credibility at the same time.
The independence point Hasan and Rigby both make is also commercially relevant here. Buyers running multi vendor artificial intelligence estates have reason to prefer an integrator with no parent manufacturer to protect, which is the position a family owned group can occupy more credibly than a listed competitor.
