In a world where digital infrastructure underpins worldwide economies, the need for secure, scalable, and efficient cloud and data center services has never been greater. With organizations across the globe speeding up their digital transformation processes, they are confronted with a range of challenging issues: matching the need for innovation with security, reducing rising costs without impairing performance, and coping with the lack of skilled talent in technical disciplines. This terrain is complicated even further by the fast-paced evolution of technologies such as artificial intelligence, edge computing, and hybrid cloud infrastructures, which are transforming how businesses compete and do business. In Saudi Arabia, these global developments converge with far-reaching national objectives set forth in Vision 2030 to place the Kingdom at the center of a global digital hub by investing heavily in digital infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Amidst this changing landscape, some leaders have stepped forward who not only manage these complexities but indeed create the future of digital infrastructure. One of them is Erick Baduy, whose transformation from sales leader to CEO of Edarat Group showcases how strategic thinking, technical savvy, and change leadership can restructure a company and an entire industry.
The Architect of Growth: Erick Baduy’s Journey
As Erick and his partner co-founded Edarat Group, they set out on a path that went beyond the usual business goals. As an Engagement Partner, initially, he tried to propel growth through strategic sales plans, but his ambitions went much further than just business transactions. Erick soon understood that knowing the dynamics of the market and customers’ demands would be the key to establishing the reputation of Edarat and determining its position in the competitive IT infrastructure market.
His leadership philosophy was founded on three primary principles: developing significant relationships, producing tangible outcomes, and making lasting value. This helped him to achieve critical insights into the challenges and expectations of clients, turning sales into a transactional process into a strategic one that guided the evolution of the company.
With Erick as its guide, Edarat Group registered notable accomplishments that charted its course toward growth. It was in 2010 when the company founded its Data Center business, and its mission is to provide TIER-certified enterprise-grade facilities. By the year 2015, Edarat had embarked on cloud-based services, selling Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS) before expanding into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions.
Erick ‘s greatest success was in December 2022, when as CEO he guided Edarat Group through its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) successfully. Not only did this milestone confirm the company’s expansion strategy but also set it up for its next phase of growth.
Transformational Leadership in Action
Erick ‘s leadership is a testament to the fact that sustainable growth means evolving continuously. He is now leading Edarat’s shift from being a project company to a subscription-based Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) provider. This strategic shift is not just a change in business model-it is a transformation in the way the company provides value to customers.
“The evolution to a subscription-based company was important to ensure growth and fit with the industry evolving to ‘everything as a service,” Erick says. This shift has allowed Edarat to expand its service menu, adding enterprise colocation, bare metal options, and private/public cloud services, in addition to total facility management for cloud and wholesale data center facilities.
The numbers tell the story: Edarat has achieved year-on-year growth in revenues and net profit for three years running, with forecasts suggesting continued momentum as new services come on stream. But this change has not been without its challenges, notably in shifting team dynamics to a culture of ongoing improvement and broadening the company’s addressable market from large corporations to medium-sized businesses.
Building a Culture of Excellence and Learning
Central to Edarat’s sustained success is a people-centric culture that matches the emphasis on technology. Erick’s leadership style is fundamentally human-focused, with a focus on developing talent, collaboration, and a growth mindset across the organization. He is convinced that innovation thrives in a setting where people feel free to try, fail, and learn from mistakes-a culture that has been embedded within Edarat’s internal culture.
To keep up with the fast pace of technology, Edarat has made continuous learning an integral part of its value system. The organization spends considerable resources on training, upskilling, and cross-functional learning initiatives, and engineers, architects, and developers continue to stay ahead of the curve in the industry. These programs not only make it easier for the organization to acquire top talent but also provide avenues for career growth, leading Edarat to become a hub for talented professionals looking to gain expertise in data center and cloud technologies.
Erick’s commitment to people goes beyond technical training. He saw the value of employee engagement and retention and implemented cutting-edge incentive programs, such as an Employee Stock Option Program (ESOP) that ties individual success to the company’s long-term growth. Shared value has created a sense of ownership and loyalty among employees that leads not only to performance but also innovation.
Driving Innovation in a Rapidly Evolving Industry
For Erick, innovation is not just a corporate catchphrase-it’s a matter of necessity fueled by passion, purpose, and market needs. He understands that the IT sector’s continuous transformation generates opportunities and pressures, especially in new sectors such as data centers, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and edge computing.
His innovation philosophy lies in addressing the challenges of everyday life. In making businesses faster, more secure, and extremely available, or enhancing data accessibility, Erick believes that technology development is to achieve concrete outcomes. This applied philosophy of innovation has placed Edarat at the cutting edge of organizational transformation and modernization movements throughout the region.
“Cloud and IT advancements have a direct impact on organizational transformation and modernization,” Erick explains. “Organizations want to remain competitive through digital innovation. Cloud services are the backbone of that transition.”
Navigating Industry Challenges
With Erick at its helm, Edarat has created advanced methods to respond to the main issues of the IT infrastructure market. Cybersecurity is still at the forefront, with the firm cooperating with top vendors to deploy hardened protection protocols, constantly updating its security frameworks to international levels, and promoting internal consciousness through continuous educational campaigns.
Reliability of service is another vital challenge, with organizations relying more on cloud service providers to ensure business continuity. Edarat’s reaction has been to create multi-region cloud infrastructure with different high-availability choices, such as backup solutions, disaster recovery architecture, and active configurations for highly resilient needs.
Cost control and resource optimization are the third pillar of Edarat’s strategy. The firm has gained proficiency in constructing modular, scalable structures that match capacity to customer needs while providing the flexibility to scale up as necessary-a key capability in an industry where customers want to pay only for what they use.
Perhaps most notably, Erick has mitigated industry-wide talent deficiencies by making deliberate investments in technical development, cross-functional training initiatives, and forward-thinking retention practices, such as an Employee Stock Option Program grounded in restricted stock units.
Visionary Strategy for the Future
Erick’s vision for Edarat is one that is well-defined and ambitious: to be the top Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) provider. This is reflective of his knowledge of trends in the emerging market, specifically the estimate that 90% of organizations would have hybrid cloud architecture by 2027.
In order to take advantage of this opportunity, Edarat has created a hybrid cloud solution that brings together colocation, private cloud, public cloud, disaster recovery, AI as a Service, and managed services. One distinguishing feature is the firm’s “single pane of glass” solution, which gives customers a single portal through which to manage all cloud environments, offering greater control, visibility, and cost savings.
Erick has also aligned Edarat’s strategy with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to further support the national vision of making the Kingdom a global digital hub. The company is already developing projects over 300 MW of data center capacity and assisting global customers to find investment opportunities as per the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology’s vision to grow data center capacity to 1.3 GW by 2030.
Shaping the Global Future of IT
In his role as CEO, Erick is prioritizing a number of key dimensions that will define the future of IT and cloud services worldwide. With an awareness of the increasing complexity and cost of multi-cloud environments, he is spearheading efforts to enable clients to maximize their cloud investments through sophisticated FinOps solutions, governance models, and automation platforms.
To meet the worldwide shortage of cloud and IT professionals, Edarat is committing significantly to training initiatives, higher education collaborations, and in-house upskilling programs, where a culture of ongoing learning can be encouraged throughout innovative areas such as cloud engineering, cybersecurity, AI, and edge computing.
Erick is also leading efforts for open, interoperable, and multi-cloud strategies to fight vendor lock-in. Through architecture-based portability, open standards, and API-centric services, Edarat enables clients to have flexibility and bargaining power in technology decisions.
Environmental sustainability is another area of emphasis, with Erick spearheading Edarat’s initiative toward cleaner IT practices through energy-efficient data center design, use of renewable energy, and advisory services to enable clients to minimize their carbon footprint.
Technology Trends and Leadership Principles
In the future, Erick sees tremendous transformation in IT and cloud services in the coming decade. He foresees hybrid cloud technologies being the most prominent, supporting microservices adoption and more scalable and agile applications. Containers, Kubernetes, and CI/CD will remain evolving as fundamental technologies for deployment and management, whereas AI, machine learning, and automation will propel intelligent, efficient operations.
For future technology leaders, Erick provides a number of essential principles: begin with a well-defined purpose other than efficiency or profitability; consider long-term how new technologies will transform your sector; cultivate a culture of innovation and cross-functional collaboration; accept change and agility; and be resilient in the presence of failures.
Legacy of Innovation and Impact
By his management at Edarat Group, Erick has showcased how visionary leadership can retool not only an organization but even an industry. By staying ahead of the market curve, overcoming intricate problems, and remaining constantly focused on innovation, he has made Edarat a player of choice in the digital transformation narrative of Saudi Arabia.
As the digital infrastructure landscape keeps changing, Erick’s combination of technical know-how, strategic vision, and adaptive leadership has been a benchmark for coping with complexity and propelling sustainable growth. From being a sales leader to an industry visionary, his journey demonstrates that leadership in the technology industry involves not only comprehending the current but actually creating the future-a principle that continues to inform Edarat Group’s role in the international digital economy.
