Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) announced today that it has hired Ahmed Shihab as Chief Product Officer. Shihab, a seasoned expert in cloud storage needs and requirements, most recently served as Corporate Vice President of Azure Storage at Microsoft. In this role, he led the engineering and operations teams for Object and Block storage, driving the design and development of Microsoft’s cloud storage solutions. As Western Digital’s new Chief Product Officer, Shihab is responsible for leading product strategy and engineering as the company accelerates innovation and development of HDD products and solutions.
“Ahmed joins Western Digital at a pivotal time for the HDD industry with data generation, AI adoption, and the demand for scalable storage continuing to grow. His expertise will be instrumental in driving innovation and meeting the industry’s evolving needs,” said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital. “Given his tenure with storage and infrastructure design and development, Ahmed is the right leader to move Western Digital forward as we help our customers unleash the power and value of data.”
With nearly 30 years of experience across product design and business leadership, Shihab has consistently delivered on the needs of the business and customers through developing a culture of quality and agile execution. Prior to his tenure at Microsoft Azure Storage, Ahmed was Vice President, Infrastructure Hardware at AWS, where he led innovation and the building and operations of AWS’s compute and storage fleet. He also served as Vice President and Chief Architect of File Systems Group at NetApp and spent more than eight years at Xyratex, a cloud infrastructure company. Shihab holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton in England.
“Hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and OEMs are looking to Western Digital to provide them with the most cutting-edge HDD technology to grow their businesses,” said Tan. “With Ahmed’s leadership, our customers can expect even more from Western Digital’s legacy of creating innovative and reliable storage solutions at scale today and well into the future.”
