Zynga Hires Former Cisco Exec to be Chief Information Officer

There certainly have been lots of new Zynga hires recently.

In addition to Kara Swisher’s BoomTown report that Zynga has hired Taylor Barada, Yahoo’s recently appointed head of M&A, for an unspecified role, Zynga has now hired former Cisco exec Debra Chrapaty as CIO.

Chrapaty previously was the SVP of Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group, where she worked on enterprise collaboration software services and cloud infrastructure.

Zynga said her experience working on one of the world’s largest networks will help support Zynga’s infrastructure and internal collaboration as it develops games for millions of players around the world.

Chrapaty will report to Zynga’s CTO, Cadir Lee.

In previous roles, Chrapaty worked at Microsoft and was also president and COO of eTrade. She left Microsoft in late 2009 for Cisco, as BoomTown reported then.

Through Zynga’s network of social games online, it gathers a ton of information and data that is useful to improve games. The better the games, the better they will monetize as players are compelled to play more.

In a statement, Chrapaty said: “Through its focus on leading technology, Zynga is redefining how we look at play. My job will be to make it easier for our employees to design and build for play. I am looking forward to tackling Zynga’s unique technology challenges and helping develop infrastructure systems to ensure that we have the most scalable, secure, and reliable systems in place.”

Zynga has been hiring aggressively, mostly though small studio acquisitions. It has been acquiring one every month for the past 11 months. Last year, it hired more than 800 people and today has more than 1,500 full-time employees in 13 offices, spanning six countries.

On Monday, Zynga beefed up its board of directors by adding Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation.

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