Saeid Ghobadi

Founder and CEO · CCIE Data Center

Principal engineer with 15+ years across enterprise networking, data centre fabric, cloud and applied AI. He designs the solution you buy and stays on the engagement that delivers it.

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Saeid Ghobadi

Founder and CEO

North York office, on site across the GTA

Profile

Who is Saeid Ghobadi?

Saeid Ghobadi is the founder and CEO of SMEnode, a Canadian IT and AI consulting firm in North York, Toronto. He's a principal engineer with more than 15 years in enterprise networking, data centre fabric, cloud architecture and applied AI, and he holds Cisco's CCIE Data Center. He started SMEnode so the engineer who designs the fix is in the room from the first call.

Leads Data Centre Services and Enterprise Networking.

Certifications

Expertise

What does Saeid work on?

Saeid works across the layers most firms split between separate teams: data centre fabric, network security, virtualisation, cloud and applied AI. The work centres on Cisco ACI and Nexus, VMware NSX and vSphere, Cisco SD-WAN, UCS compute and F5 application delivery, with Zero Trust design and hybrid builds on AWS and Azure. Saeid designs the architecture and stays on the engagement until it's running.

The CCIE Data Center is the expert tier of Cisco's certification track, and it ends in an eight-hour hands-on lab, not a multiple-choice test. The badge is verifiable on Credly under the full name Saeid Khanipour Ghobadi.

  1. Data centre and network

    • Cisco ACI
    • Nexus
    • NDFC
    • UCS
    • SD-WAN
    • F5

  2. Virtualisation and cloud

    • VMware NSX
    • vSphere
    • AWS
    • Azure

  3. Security

    • Zero Trust
    • Firewalls
    • Cisco ISE
    • Segmentation

  4. Applied AI

    • AI strategy
    • RAG
    • GPU planning
    • Sovereign AI
Story

Why did Saeid start SMEnode?

Saeid started SMEnode in 2021 to put infrastructure and AI under one roof, from layer one to the LLM, after seeing the same gap again and again. AI consultancies couldn't rack a GPU, build an NSX fabric or run a SOC. Infrastructure firms couldn't build a RAG pipeline or red-team a model. Clients ended up hiring two vendors who didn't talk to each other.

Today SMEnode works with mid-market and enterprise organisations, and public-sector clients, across Canada. When a project closes, the client chooses: the engineer who built it keeps running it, or SMEnode hands it to the client's team with the documentation and training to run it themselves.

Focus

What is Saeid focused on now?

Saeid's priority for 2026 and beyond is helping Canadian organisations adopt AI without losing control of their data, their costs or their compliance under PIPEDA, Quebec's Law 25 and sector rules such as the OSFI guidelines. As CEO, Saeid also sets SMEnode's direction, leads business development and directs the AI practice, stays hands-on with architecture on major engagements and mentors the firm's engineers.

  • PIPEDA
  • Quebec Law 25
  • OSFI guidelines
Writing

What has Saeid written?

Saeid writes the SMEnode blog. His articles cover AI in IT operations, what cloud costs in Canadian dollars, co-managed and fully managed IT, and managed security, each with the Canadian rules that apply. These are his three newest. The blog holds the rest, newest first.

All 14 articles by Saeid

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