Leadership

Ahmar Abbas

Founder and CEO

Ahmar Abbas is the Founder and CEO of XtremeLabs, an education technology company focused on hands-on learning, virtual labs, simulations, and practical skills development.

An electrical engineer by training, Ahmar has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of technology, education, and business. His career began during the formative years of the commercial Internet, including time at UUNET/WorldCom, before moving into education technology and leadership roles at Blackboard. In 2018, he founded XtremeLabs with a focus on a simple idea: technology skills are learned best by doing.

Under his leadership, XtremeLabs has grown into a global learning technology company serving hundreds of thousands of learners through virtual labs, simulations, courseware, and its digital learning marketplace. The company works across the technology certification and workforce development ecosystem, helping learners move beyond simply understanding a technology to actually using it.

Ahmar is also the author of Grid Computing: A Practical Guide to Technology and Applications and has remained closely involved with emerging technologies throughout his career. His current interests include artificial intelligence, simulation-based learning, and how AI is changing the relationship between knowledge, context, and human expertise.

Outside XtremeLabs, Ahmar is involved in education, entrepreneurship, and sports development. He serves on the board of the Institute of Emerging Careers and has been actively involved in squash as a player, referee, organizer, and supporter of grassroots and junior development initiatives in both the United States and Pakistan.

Across these interests runs a common theme: building practical systems that give people the opportunity to learn, compete, and improve.

Barry Hytowitz

Director of Growth

Barry comes to Xtremelabs with twenty years of experience nurturing, growing and managing professional relationships with executives in various high value technology driven businesses. He has an extensive background in economics, business services, IT training, marketing, market expansion and management. In the IT training space… Barry worked with the largest IT training companies, private companies, colleges and universities and government (military and civilian) entities with significant training and consulting services and programs around the world for more than eleven years.

Trained on a customer first and growth oriented business development and management strategy early in his career, Mr. Hytowitz continues to achieve successful outcomes by leading teams in utilizing a consultative approach for customer satisfaction while focusing on productive business processes and the continued strengthening of professional relationships.

Shehriyar Zafar

Head of Development

Shehriyar Zafar is the Head of Development with a track record of crafting innovative and scalable software solutions. With expertise in system design, cloud computing, and a strong foundation in multiple programming languages, he excels at translating complex business requirements into elegant, high-performance architectures.

With over a decade of experience in the IT sector, Shehriyar has led cross-functional teams of various sizes and in different industries to develop cutting-edge software products, embracing best practices in coding, security, and agile methodologies.

Conrad Cahill

Director, Infrastructure

Conrad Cahill is Director of Infrastructure at XtremeLabs, where he is responsible for the technology infrastructure that supports the company's learning platforms and services. His responsibilities include cloud platforms, virtualization, network infrastructure, system resilience, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

Conrad brings more than two decades of technology experience, including 12 years as a Senior Virtualization Solutions Architect before assuming his current role at XtremeLabs in 2018.