Donuts Appoints Akram J. Atallah as CEO

SEATTLE, Oct. 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Donuts Inc., the global leader in high-quality, new top-level Internet domains, today announced that Akram J. Atallah will assume the role of chief executive officer, effective November 12, 2018. Current CEO Bruce Jaffe is stepping down and will continue to act as a senior advisor to the company during this transition.

"We thank Bruce for his stewardship of Donuts, during which in his tenure as president and chief executive officer, the company raised over $100 million in debt financing to acquire Rightside, and successfully engaged in a process to sell Donuts to Abry Partners," said Erik Brooks, managing partner at Abry Partners and Donuts board member. 

"We are delighted to welcome Akram to Donuts," Erik continued. "His deep experience in managing global organizations and rapidly-growing technology companies will be essential to driving Donuts' next phase of growth. We are confident that Akram's proven track record in and outside the domain name industry will broaden Donuts' reputation as the innovative industry platform for new top-level domains and will enable the company to pursue rapid growth along multiple pathways."  

Akram joins Donuts from ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, where he served as the first president of ICANN's Global Domains Division and oversaw the management of generic domain operations, domain name industry engagement and web services. Previously, Akram served as ICANN's chief operating officer.

"I am thrilled to join the Donuts team," said Akram Atallah. "I relish the challenge of further expanding overall awareness of the company's incredible top-level domain (TLD) assets, discovering new ways to use and leverage TLDs, and through its growth and success making Donuts a recognized, global innovation platform for people and organizations to create and manage their digital identities."   

Akram's diversified technology experience runs the gamut from engineering to operations to product development and marketing. Before ICANN, he was chief operation officer at CoreObjects Software, an engineering services start-up. Prior to CoreObjects, he was general manager of the Broadband Access business unit at Conexant, and before that was the general manager of its Universal Access business, where he grew it to more than $800 million in revenues. His accomplishments at Conexant also included improved profit margins, transforming the marketing and engineering functions, and restoring its global market leadership position.

Akram holds a master's in business administration, a master's in electrical engineering and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Colorado at Denver. He is trilingual in English, Arabic, and French.

About Donuts

Donuts simplifies and connects a fragmented online world with domain names and related technologies that allow people and businesses to build, market and own their digital identities. Donuts holds the world's largest portfolio of new top-level domains and offers a wide variety of clear and meaningful names for use as business identifiers (such as .ltd, .company), navigation (such as .careers, .support), in vertical markets (such as .photography, .cafe,  or .builders) or in broad-based generics (such as .life, .world or .live). Donuts provides its registrar / reseller customers with innovative services for the discovery, registration, usage and monetization of high-quality domain names. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Donuts, the registrar Name.com is one of the most admired brands in the industry. In 2017, Donuts was named Number 1 in the Deloitte Fast 500. Donuts' headquarters are in Kirkland, WA.

Contact:
Judith McGarry
(415) 971-2900
[email protected]

SOURCE Donuts Inc.

Related Links

http://www.donuts.domains