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DDN has appointed Mohsen Moazami as vice chairman, possibly signaling an IPO intention.
DDN took in $300 million in January last year from the Blackstone private equity business and has been focusing more and more on enterprise AI as well as its traditional high-performance computing beat following its success in the Nvidia AI training market. It has been emphasizing its Infinia object storage system alongside its HPC-originated Lustre software, placing both underneath a single DDN control plane.
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Moazami will work closely with CEO and co-founder Alex Bouzari and the executive team to “advance DDN’s next phase of growth.” This will involve deepening global customer relationships, expanding government and sovereign engagements, and strengthening the company’s long-term positioning with the investment community.
Moazami was a member of the Office of the CEO and President of International at Groq, through and shortly after its $20 billion agreement with Nvidia. Previously he founded a venture capital firm, CNTP, and before that spent 12 years at Cisco where his last role was on the leadership team of the Emerging Markets group with a span of 132 countries and managing a $6 billion P&L.
DDN founders Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch sit on the board, along with CTO and Infinia architect Sven Oehme, and Jas Khaira from Blackstone, where he is Head of Americas and Founding Member of the Tactical Opportunities Group.
A LinkedIn post by Moazami said: “I’m thrilled to join DDN as vice chairman to help scale the world’s most powerful data infrastructure – the essential foundation powering the global AI revolution. A Blackstone-backed high-growth company, I am jazzed to work side by side with Alex Bouzari, Paul Bloch, and Jasvinder Khaira.”
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This and Moazami’s vice chair title implies he is a DDN board member, but because he is not explicitly listed as such, we’ve asked DDN to clarify this and it told us: “He is not on the board.”
As we understand it, there is no need for Moazami to strengthen DDN’s long-term positioning with the investment community, unless that community is investing in DDN. Moazami’s background suggests he will be talking to institutional-class investors. We read his appointment as a signal that DDN could be planning an IPO for 2027, possibly earlier.
Other recent DDN exec-level hires since the Blackstone investment include chief product officer Omer Asad, and Chris Schin as a VP of product management. He joins DDN after a short career break following being GM of data protection at HPE until April this year. Asad’s CV includes a stint at HPE looking after the Zerto data protection product.
