Fred Pekar is a Partner and Director AI Transformation of Portal Global, based in Abu Dhabi.
He was formerly a Senior Project Manager at WWT/VTS in Abu Dhabi, where he led AI business transformation for UAE construction, media and investment clients, ran an AI security product programme from concept to commercial release and, as client Project Manager, managed 15 vendors across the scoping and design of three of Core42’s largest GPU-as-a-Service AI data centre builds, spanning a new build, a retrofit and an extension across Europe and the USA.
This builds on a fifteen-year track record delivering mission-critical technology programmes across government, financial services and utilities in Australia. As Senior Project Manager at Leidos (2019 to 2024), Fred led the Australian Tax Office’s first full data centre failover test with zero business impact, led a 55-person Defence data centre migration team, and delivered an application remediation programme for Parliamentary users. At AEMO (2019), he built the treatment framework and business cases for around 400 applications, sequencing remediation by dependency, resourcing and total cost of ownership. At Energy Australia (2017 to 2018), he recovered a stalled programme through stakeholder realignment and rebaselining, and delivered a ServiceNow, CMDB and Service Catalogue upgrade that cut IT hardware fulfilment lead times by 70%.
Earlier, as Senior Project and Programme Manager at ANZ Bank (2014 to 2017), Fred delivered the bank’s largest technology programme, including a single-cutover implementation of a global platform securitising US$200 billion in assets annually with zero user impact, addressing APRA findings. His further experience spans various IT roles since 2006.
Known for building stakeholder trust under pressure, Fred combines deep technical delivery experience across AI transformation, data centre builds and migrations, and the remediation of complex, highly integrated systems, with the commercial and vendor management skills developed through tender management and contract negotiation on high-value government and enterprise engagements.
He holds a Master of Business Administration from Plymouth University and a Bachelor of Business Informatics from the University of Canberra, and is a DSDM Agile Practitioner and PRINCE2 Practitioner, with additional training in Kepner-Fourie Project Problem Solving and Root Cause Analysis.