Name: Virtech
Address: Office 605, Rania Business Center, Al Barsha 1, Dubai, AE
Telephone: +971 4 580 7555

Virgil Dobos of Virtech with Shabhan Alahmad at the Cohesity stand, LEAP 2026 Riyadh — Virgil Dobos with Shabhan Alahmad at the Cohesity stand, LEAP 2026.

LEAP moved from February to the end of the summer this year. Riyadh did not get any cooler, and neither did the deals.

The fifth edition of LEAP ran from 31 August to 3 September 2026 at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham, again under the theme "Into New Worlds". The organisers reported close to US$15 billion in investments and agreements, much of it in AI infrastructure, data centres and cloud.

Virtech joined our partner Cohesity and its local team for the week. Virgil Dobos represented Virtech, alongside Shabhan Alahmad from a fellow partner.

What we heard in Riyadh

Data centres are going up fast. New hyperscale cloud regions and sovereign AI capacity were announced throughout the week. More capacity means more data, and more data to protect.
AI needs a recovery plan too. Models, training data and vector stores are now business-critical. If they are encrypted by ransomware, "we'll retrain it" is not a plan.
Resilience is a board topic. Cohesity's message at its stand was simple: resilience everywhere. Customers asked less about backup speed and more about how quickly and cleanly they can recover after a cyber attack.

Where Virtech fits in

The Kingdom is building the infrastructure for its AI future at remarkable speed. Our job is less glamorous but just as important: making sure the data inside that infrastructure is protected, recoverable and compliant.

We design, deploy and support Cohesity and NetBackup for organisations across Saudi Arabia and the GCC, and we hold Cohesity's Best Services Partner award for the Middle East (read the GITEX 2025 story). Useful starting points:

Backup and recovery design for Cohesity and NetBackup, including immutable and isolated copies
High availability for the systems that cannot go down
An IT health check to test whether you could really recover from a cyber attack

Shukran, LEAP

Thank you to the Cohesity team for hosting us, and to everyone who made time for a conversation between the keynotes. We'll be back for LEAP 2027 in April. Riyadh in spring sounds very reasonable.

Planning AI or data centre growth in Saudi Arabia? Make sure you can recover what you build.

Email sales@virtech.ae, call +971 4 580 7555 or book a health check.