IDG CEO Mohamad Ali to step down at the end of the month

Ali led the firm for four years and helped engineer its sale to Blackstone

Mohamad Ali, the chief executive of Needham-based tech research firm IDG, has made plans to step down at the end of May.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

Tech research firm International Data Group will soon have a new boss, now that chief executive Mohamad Ali has made plans to step down at the end of May.

Former Concur CEO Steve Singh, IDG’s board chair since early 2022, will take over as executive chairman of the 4,000-person company. (IDG’s board is expected to start looking for a new CEO.) Singh is based in the Seattle area, and has been a managing director at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based investment firm, for the past three years.

Ali joined Needham-based IDG in mid-2019 after leading Boston data-storage firm Carbonite, and he helped engineer a deal in 2021 to sell IDG to private equity giant Blackstone for $1.3 billion. As CEO at IDG, he helped accelerate the company’s shift away from emphasizing its tech media properties to focus more on its work as a sales platform that connects buyers and sellers of big IT hardware and software transactions. He said he plans to announce his next step sometime in the summer, possibly into the artificial intelligence or clean-tech sectors.

“It’s been a remarkable four years,” Ali wrote in an email. “We transformed a media company into a data and software company, saw breathtaking growth, navigated a pandemic, and sold to Blackstone. I plan to take the summer off, travel, and advise some of our policy makers on certain economic matters.”