Donuts appoints ICANN’s Akram J. Atallah as CEO

Donuts Inc. 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.”

Before ICANN Akram Atallah 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.

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.