#7 Gary Adams, President of Parsons Middle East Africa

Gary Adams, President of Parsons Middle East & Africa, ranks 7th on our annual list of the Middle East’s Top 60 most prominent contractors, real estate developers, consultants, and facilities management companies. 

7. Gary Adams, President of Parsons Middle East Africa

Gary Adams is President of Parsons Middle East Africa (MEA), a regional unit of Virginia-based Parsons Corporation, a digitally enabled solutions provider in the defense, security, and infrastructure markets with annual revenues exceeding $3 billion. The MEA unit employs more than 4,500 people and provides services in land development, buildings, roads & bridges, airports, rail & transit systems, smart cities, and oil & gas infrastructure. Gary also provides regional leadership for Parsons’ security and defense offerings.

Prior to his role as President of MEA, Gary held positions with increasing levels of responsibility, most recently as Executive Vice President and Global Operations Director of Parsons Transportation Group (now known as Parsons Infrastructure). He has extensive experience in complex transportation projects, and his multidisciplinary background combines civil engineering, traffic engineering, highway design, and transportation planning. He is an accomplished project manager with experience directing numerous large and complex projects including several employing design-build delivery. He has continued to participate on selected mega- design-build and PPP heavy civil projects at the joint venture board level.

During his five-year tenure as head of Parsons’ Middle East, Gary’s leadership has been vital to shaping Parsons’ MEA market strategy, adopting new smart solutions technologies to address the region’s ever-evolving challenges. As a result of his leadership, Parsons is firmly positioned as a market leader in critical infrastructure, technical design and engineering services, and mobility solutions.

Parsons are set to be involved in some of the biggest projects in the UAE and GCC. These projects include Riyadh Metro, Expo 2020 Dubai (Infrastructure and EXPO Metro Extension), Abu Dhabi International Airport Expansion, and Dubai ITS2020 Project and Traffic Control Center.

In addition to that, in the past 12 months Parsons made two acquisitions has been a game changer for the company. The first was the acquisition of Polaris Alpha, an advanced, technology-focused provider of innovative mission solutions for complex defense, intelligence, and security customers, as well as other U.S. federal government customers. Parsons acquired Polaris Alpha from private equity firm Arlington Capital Partners, and was the latest in the company’s series of strategic investments focused on companies with technologies aligned to evolving threats in the land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains.

The second acquisition was OGSystems, an innovative solutions provider with advanced technologies in geospatial intelligence, big data analytics, and threat mitigation. OGSystems’ core defense and intelligence customers include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

Parson’s CEO Chuck Harrington expressed the importance of making these acquisitions: “Parsons’ strategy is focused on disruptive, differentiated technologies demanded in high-growth, mission-oriented programs in the defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure sectors.”

“The actionable intelligence that geospatial imagery and data analytics brings to Parsons’ portfolio through OGSystems is a game changer. Whether informing our national security customers’ mission planning or designing tomorrow’s resilient smart city, Parsons now brings deeper intelligence expertise to the challenge.”