Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty Named Nirvanix CEO, Sees Analytics Play For Storage Company, Continued Rivalry With AWS

Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty has a new job as the CEO at Nirvanix, the Khosla Ventures backed enterprise storage company that she expects to further compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and extend into the business analytics market.

Chrapaty initially joined Nirvanix last November as chairwoman of the board when Khosla became lead investor in the company that is also funded by Intel Capital. She replaces Dru Borden, who will remain a part of the Nirvanix leadership team as senior vice president of planning & development and remain as a board member Chrapaty will start her new job in April.

Chrapaty led Zynga’s build out of its infrastructure. While there, Zynga became AWS largest customer before she directed the build out of the company’s own gaming cloud.

Prior to Zynga, Chrapaty worked at Cisco, helping direct the development of its collaboration platform. Before Cisco, she worked at Microsoft where she said in an email she built out Windows Azure.

Nirvanix has earned a place in the market for its capability to store petabytes of data. Chrapaty said the company builds out storage infrastructures for the cloud, on-premise or hybrid. Its technology replaces more traditional technologies like magnetic tape and EMC/ NetApp boxes.

She said the company has an opportunity to build out an analytics stack. With that in mind, I asked if Nirvanix also plans to offer compute capabilities? She said she need to explore what an analytics stack would look like.

Chrapaty echoes what is becoming a roar. Fortune 1000 companies are embracing the cloud. And storage needs a home.

That’s a good thing for Nirvanix but also AWS, Windows Azure, Box, Dropbox and the host of other companies looking to carve a niche in an increasingly commoditized storage market.

(Lead Photo credit: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)