Istanbul, Istanbul, Türkiye
Senior infrastructure, cloud, and data center operations executive with 23+ years of experience leading large-scale enterprise technology environments in telecommunications and mission-critical operations. Brings a track record of aligning technology strategy with business growth, operational resilience, and large-scale transformation. Most recently served as Data Center, Infrastructure and Cloud Services Director at Türk Telekom, leading a national-scale organization spanning 5 data centers, 135+ PB of storage, 25,000 virtual servers, 15,000+ hosts, and a team of 400+. Delivered fivefold revenue growth, doubled its customer base, expanded the service catalog from 30 to 80+ offerings, and achieved more than $32M in documented savings while sustaining 99.989% availability across 200+ critical services. Led enterprise-wide modernization initiatives, including zero-downtime migrations of mission-critical environments, the launch of Türkiye’s first pay-as-you-go Virtual Data Center marketplace. This broader transformation also resulted in securing TSE EN 50600 Design and Operation certifications and has been recognized through 15+ international and national awards, including IDC, MWC, DCS, and Schneider Electric. Built and scaled high-performing organizations, growing the team from 100 to 400+ professionals, mentoring 21 managers, and establishing learning initiatives reaching 3,000+ participants. Core focus areas include data center & cloud business strategies, infrastructure & platform technology strategies, telco scale technology operations, AIOps, DevSecOps, GitOps, service reliability, vendor governance, budget ownership, and large-scale enterprise transformation.
• Led one of the region’s largest telco-scale infrastructure environments: 5 data centers, 135+ PB storage, 25 000+ servers (7000+ physical, 18 000+ virtual)& 200+ critical services, delivering 99.989% availability • Scaled and led a 400+ organization (21 managers), transforming the unit into an enterprise-grade operation and key driver of strategic and commercial value • Delivered 5× revenue growth, doubled the customer base, and expanded the service portfolio from 30 to 80+ offerings aligned with global benchmarks • Owned multi-million-dollar OPEX/CAPEX budgets, including planning, vendor negotiations, and investment prioritization across data center, infrastructure & cloud platforms • Led consolidation and migration of critical IT & Core Network Mobile data centers (300+ applications, 1000+ physical & 3500+ virtual servers, 150+ databases, 30PB+ data) → achieved zero downtime and avoided over $15M in external consultancy costs • Launched Türkiye’s first pay-as-you-go VDC Cloud Marketplace → acquired 100+ customers in year one → increased revenues by 250% • Implemented PaaS, DevSecOps, GitOps & microservices transformation across 150+ applications → reduced deployment time from hours to seconds → saved ~1040 man-days per cycle • Reduced End-of-Support systems from 27% to 1% and achieved 65% infrastructure and cost optimization through open-source transformation • Implemented enterprise-wide AIOps, optimizing storage, compute & cooling → achieved 30% cooling cost reduction • Led national-level DCIM implementation and achieved TSE EN 50600 Design & Operation Certifications (first in Türkiye) • Built a high-performance culture; developed talent through cloud bootcamp (200+ students) and digital learning platform (3,000+ users) • Recognized with 15+ international and national awards (IDC, MWC, Future of Cloud Summit, Schneider Electric, DCS Awards, CXO Medya) for innovation, efficiency, and sustainability
• Led and manage a team of line managers and experts from Network Planning, Data Center Planning, Data Center Service Design and Server & Storage Planning divisions that are responsible for the design, development, procurement, installation, commissioning and capacity planning of Data Center Services such as co-location, hosting, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), DC Networking. • Led projects for new data center facilities, over 20,000 sqm whitespaces, in accordance with business plan and IT needs to deliver results on-time, on budget and aligned with customer needs. • Designed and develop competitive and customer friendly services related to data center. • Evaluated and analyze IT Infrastructure needs of data center services, cloud services, digital media services and enterprise & individual services; lead designing, planning, procurement, installation, operation stages and manage transfer activities to operation team. • Managed infrastructure capacity and growth planning in accordance with the business plans of data center services (co-location, IaaS, PaaS and Cloud Services IaaS infrastructure). • Provided consultancy to product owners and strategic business planning teams on technical issues related to data center business plan. • Served as primary consultant to project managers, custom solution team, sales teams related to data center services. • Assessed new data center, IT infrastructure and cloud technologies and recommend appropriate technical solutions to product owners. • Led the planning of cooling, power and data network infrastructure of data centers; evaluate new technologies and products to identify feasible solutions. • Managed data center strategies in terms of physical space and infrastructure of colocation and corporate IT systems to improve site efficiency and reduce the PUE metric (Power Usage Effectiveness). • Designed long-term strategies and implement activities to achieve identified goals.
• Led Infrastructure System Planning team consisted of specialists that were responsible for designing, assessing, preparing and implementing highly complex projects, including identifying capacity and infrastructure requirements, analyzing trends in IT Infrastructure environment, assessing new technologies, designing infrastructure solutions around HP, Sun (Oracle), Dell and IBM servers and vendor specific hardware with high availability clusters, performing virtualization and disaster recovery, delivering infrastructure documentations (such as recommendations for growth and/or efficiency, grow server metrics analysis) and promoting a clear and consistent business vision. • Led Infrastructure System Planning team that were responsible for designing and preparing the infrastructure requirements for new project during the project live cycle. • Led transition projects. • Managed Infrastructure System Planning Teams that are responsible for capacity planning and trend analyses of IT infrastructure environment. • Managed budget and vendor of server infrastructure of all technology (IT, Network) projects.
• Performed as System Architect for planning of operating systems, cluster software and hardware. • Designed, installed and configured infrastructure for IT business projects around HP, Sun (Oracle), Dell and IBM servers. • Managed the designing, installing and configuring of infrastructure for new IT business project during the project live cycle. • Managed infrastructure documentations, applications and server metrics. • Identified infrastructure requirements, including purchase, license and subscription. requirements and provided recommendations for new purchases and system improvements. • Led interdepartmental working sessions to achieve efficiency and success in infrastructure designing. • Provided 3. level support to System Operation team.
• Provided support for the system administrators and troubleshooting Sun (Oracle), HP, IBM, Redhat product family. • Managed end-to-end hardware and operating systems, clusters, disaster, recovery and business continuity operations, security and computability activities. • Performed support for planning team and system administrators and troubleshooting.
• Performed installation and maintenance functions related to Sun Systems and storages, Solaris, Veritas and Netapp products. • Provided 7x24 Technical support for HW / SW Sun (Oracle), Veritas and Netapp products (after office hours on-call and on-site customer service) to Gantek’s customers. • Provided support to system administrators and troubleshoot. • Provided installation service for multinational projects including cluster projects for Cyprus Turkcell.