Zynga CIO Chrapaty jumps ship, becomes cloud-storage CEO

Debra Chrapaty, a former executive at Cisco Microsoft, and E*Trade, will leave her CIO post at Zynga next month to become CEO of enterprise cloud-storage vendor Nirvanix.

Chrapaty’s move isn’t a complete surprise, given that (a) cloud storage is hot, (b) Zynga is not and (c) Chrapaty has served as Nirvanix’s executive board chairwoman since November.

Chrapaty has the infrastructure chops to lead a company keen on expanding clouds. At Zynga, she oversaw the company’s switch from Amazon Web Services to its own specialized cloud. Earlier, she was in charge as Microsoft expanded its data center footprint. She has also been president and chief operating officer of E*Trade and senior vice president of the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco.

Based in San Diego, Nirvanix has racked up more than 1,200 customers and $ 70 million in venture funding. Backers include Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital. Peddling as it does public, private and hybrid clouds and cloud gateways for enterprises, it sees competitors in many directions, including Amazon and Microsoft on the public front, Dropbox and Box in the smaller-business area, and EMC and NetApp on the legacy-vendor stage.

Chrapaty nevertheless sounded optimistic as she talked about her new gig. “What I’m excited about for Nirvanix is we actually offer this unique solution that’s both public- and private-cloud based, highly available, secure for the enterprise, but also variable deployment models,” she said. “So we’re meeting a unique need for the Fortune 1000 companies.”

In the coming months, Nirvanix will make some decisions about expand its focus to products other than storage, which could distinguish it, but Chrapaty declined to go into detail about the possibilities. We’re eager to see the game plan, as it could bring more enterprises into the cloud-storage fold and make Nirvanix a bigger player.

What will come of Zynga? That’s a whole other story. Chrapaty is the latest executive to leave the one-time social-gaming star, and the stock has lingered under $ 4 since August.

Zynga on Monday sent a statement from its chief operations officer, David Ko, naming Chrapaty’s successor:

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors. Today, I am proud to announce that Dorion Carroll is moving into the role of Chief Information Officer effective immediately. Dorion is a 25-year engineering veteran with deep experience developing products and services as well as scaling teams from start-up phase to large companies. As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past 3 years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders. Our global network of players relies on the exceptional talent of our technology teams and the services they provide. We look forward to Dorion’s leadership to bring even more prioritization and focus to these teams.”