Abdullah Jarwan is the chief executive officer of CNTXT, a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Cognite that delivers cloud and digital transformation products and services to the Middle East and North Africa.
He has been the company’s CEO since its establishment this year with the aim of contributing toward Saudi Arabia’s digital reforms.
Jarwan has more than two decades of experience leading teams in cybersecurity, IT infrastructure, cloud, and applications development domains with Aramco.
He joined Aramco in 2002 as a system administrator spending nearly seven years supporting various company computing systems in Dhahran.
In 2009, he moved to Austin, Texas to work as a system specialist with the identity management development team for Sun Microsystems before returning to Aramco in 2010 where he became access control selections group leader and in October 2011 head of the firm’s identity and access management organization.
In August 2012, he led an application recovery task force during a cybersecurity incident and between 2013 and 2016 headed Aramco’s access management division.
This led to his appointment in August 2016 as head of the systems support division responsible for establishing and managing Aramco’s private cloud and IT infrastructure.
Before becoming CEO of CNTXT, Jarwan was business development consultant at Aramco from February 2020 to June 2022, a role that involved establishing new business ventures from origination to execution.
During his time at Aramco, he worked closely with the Cognite team in digitizing many company operations and in February 2020 led negotiations with Cognite and Google Cloud to establish CNTXT.
Jarwan gained a bachelor’s degree in management information systems from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran.
