Zynga cloud guru Allan Leinwand departs for ServiceNow

Allan Leinwand has been the lead force behind Zynga’s hybrid cloud efforts. But the struggling social games company’s chief technical officer has to take a similar position at ServiceNow, according to his LinkedIn profile.

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Zynga chief marketing officer Jeff Karp also announced that he is leaving the company today.

As the architect of Zynga’s “zCloud,” Leinwand used a combination of public and private clouds to better scale Zynga’s many social games. His talk at last year’s CloudBeat conference impressed us, and we featured a guest post by Leinwand last December that described the challenges and successes of the hybrid cloud approach. By February, the company had shifted 80 percent of its game traffic to its private cloud.

But even with his successes, Leinwand had good reason to leave. Zynga has had a hard time lately, with its quarterly reports disappointing and its executives fleeing for pastures far from FarmVille. The company has been accused of insider trading, and Zynga’s stock is sitting at $2.82 a share today.

Before Zynga, Leinwand helped found Vyatta, a leader in software-based networking. He also spent several years with Digital Island and Cisco.

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Allan Leinwand photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat