In February 2026, Zero&One, the first homegrown AWS Premier Consulting Partner in the Middle East and North Africa, was acquired by NTT DATA, one of the world’s largest IT services companies. For Ali El Kontar, the founder and CEO who built Zero&One from a small team in Beirut into a regional force, the announcement was not sudden. It was the result of a journey that began a decade earlier, in a London hotel lobby, with a logo and a smiley face.
Ali was wrapping up a data center upgrade project in late 2015 when he happened to walk past an AWS event. Curious by nature, he stepped in. That same night, back in his hotel room, he opened an AWS account, launched a virtual machine, and hosted a website in minutes. For a seasoned network engineer who had spent years building physical infrastructure, it felt like the ground had shifted.
“I said, I’m going to be obsolete,” he recalls. “But instead of panicking, I wanted to understand it. I wanted to become the next version of myself.”
That moment, equal parts curiosity and fear, became the founding logic of Zero&One. Ali had recently graduated from the American University of Beirut with an MBA, and he still had that marketing assignment sitting in the back of his head — the one where his professor challenged the class to create a brand that could outlive its founder.
He built it around a simple idea: everything in technology, at its core, comes down to zeros and ones.
He bought the domain.
He wrote the mission: innovate to simplify complexity.
All he needed now was the right person beside him.
He called his oldest friend, also named Ali, who became his CTO and co-founder. They split the work cleanly: one handled business, sales, and brand. The other handled technical delivery and support.
“We were not competing,” Ali says. “We were complementing.”
The company, launched in 2017, set one clear goal: to become the top AWS partner in the region. They achieved it in 2022, becoming the first AWS Premier Consulting Partner in MENA.
Around 2020, Zero&One made another move that proved just as important. With a team of six or seven employees and growing, Ali came to Beirut Digital District in search of office space. He had been commuting between Dubai and Beirut, trying to build something in both places at once.
When he walked through BDD and saw the newer buildings going up, he told the team half-seriously that he wanted Zero&One’s logo on one of them someday. At the time, he had a handful of staff and no full office.
Years later, the company occupied a full floor.
“Being in BDD today is a flex,” he says.
Through the banking crisis, through COVID, and through the war, BDD remained one of the few places in Beirut where electricity and internet were a given, not a hope.
Beyond the infrastructure, Ali valued the community most.
He describes the effect simply: 1 plus 1 equals 11.
A conversation over coffee about a technical problem. A casual introduction that leads to a new hire. Someone relocating and finding their footing in a room full of people building similar things.
“When we sit together as a tech community and discuss the issues we have in our work,” he says, “you’re teaching someone something that might help their future project.”
The culture Ali built inside Zero&One followed a similar logic. He hired for attitude, not skill set. He pushed his team toward the latest certifications, funded conference travel, and ran internal hackathons using BDD’s facilities.
The company also created a role that few organizations of its size in the region have: an innovation manager — someone whose entire job is to take a solution built for one client and figure out how to make it work for an entire industry.
As Ali often says, what brought you here cannot take you there.
Staying relevant requires constantly reinventing the work before competitors catch up.
When he started having acquisition conversations, he had over twenty before deciding that the timing and the partner were right.
The market had matured. Larger players were consolidating across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The signals were clear.
What took longer to find was a match that would not undo what Zero&One had built.
NTT DATA was the answer — partly because of its financial strength and global reach, but mostly because of its people.
“When I met their team,” Ali says, “people were introducing themselves saying they had been with NTT DATA for 17 years, 23 years, 29 years. In IT, in innovation, in this industry, I hadn’t seen that in a long time.”
A people-driven business needed a people-driven home.
Post-acquisition, Zero&One will continue serving the Middle East as NTT DATA’s cloud and AI specialist in the region. Clients will see the same team and the same approach — now backed by the global scale and capabilities of NTT DATA.
Ali often explains the partnership using the story of Disney and Pixar.
When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, many people inside Pixar were worried. Not about money or titles, but about identity. They feared that becoming part of a much larger company might dilute what made them special.
But the opposite happened.
Disney didn’t turn Pixar into Disney. Pixar kept its culture, its creative process, and its way of building stories — while Disney amplified its reach to the world.
For Ali, that is the model he believes in.
The goal is not to disappear inside something bigger, but to multiply what already works.
