Carbonite CEO Ali Steps Down To Join IDG

After four-and-a-half years at the helm of cloud data protection vendor Carbonite, Mohamad Ali is moving on to a new role.

Mohamad Ali has stepped down as president and CEO and as a member of the board of directors of cloud data protection vendor Carbonite, the company said late Thursday.

Carbonite Chairman Steve Munford has been named interim CEO and executive chairman.

Ali, who spent over four-and-a-half years as head of Boston-based Carbonite, left to join the International Data Group, or IDG, the Framingham, Mass.-based IT industry analyst firm, as CEO.

[Related: Carbonite After Mohamad Ali: Firm Searches For New CEO While Absorbing Webroot]

Munford has served as Carbonite's chairman of the board for over five-and-a-half years. He also serves on the board of directors at several other IT companies, and is also chairman of Stockholm, Sweden-based Apica Systems. Munford also served as interim CEO at Vancouver, B.C.-based Absolute Software in 2018, and prior to that spent nine years at Oxford, U.K.-based Sophos, including nearly seven years as CEO .

Ali (pictured) joined Carbonite in late 2014 at a time when the company had just rejected an offer by Los Angeles-based cloud services firm J2 Global to purchase the company for about $404 million. The company currently as a market capitalization of over $823 million.

When Ali joined Carbonite, he succeeded Carbonite Co-Founder and CEO David Friend who went on to found cross-town rival data protection technology developer Wasabi.

In addition to organically growing Carbonite's cloud storage business, Ali also led the company in a number of acquisitions. The biggest was the $618.5-million acquisition of cloud-based cybersecurity technology developer Webroot early this year. He also oversaw last year's $146-million acquisition of rival cloud storage provider Mozy from Dell Technologies.