Manish Goel, the executive vice president of production operations for NetApp, is resigning effective Friday, September 20. NetApp said that the veteran executive is leaving the company to assume the role of chief executive officer for an unnamed analytics startup in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Goel has handed over the reins to George Kurian, who formerly served as the senior vice president of NetApp’s Data ONTAP Group. Kurian joined the vendor in 2011 as senior vice president of the Storage Solutions Group.

Goel is the second NetApp executive to resign this month. Vaughn Stewart, the company’s former director of technical marketing and cloud evangelist, announced in a Monday blog post that he has quit his post to join all-flash array vendor Pure Storage.

The two resignations come at an awkward time, given NetApp’s current efforts to establish ONTAP as a foundation for greater cloud interoperability through a massive initiative that spans partnerships, OpenStack contributions and new enterprise solutions. The latter lineup includes new hypervisor translation software that promises to simplify workload migrations between ONTAP deployments that utilize different virtualization frameworks.

The technology will launch into general availability in the coming months, along with new FlexPod specifications for hyperscale and multi-tenant environments. NetApp also plans to expand support for open-source platforms in a move to give customers more choice for technologies and public cloud providers.

“NetApp has contributed OpenStack drivers so users can leverage an open-source cloud management layer to build private and public clouds that delivers high-performing, efficient, and scalable cloud services,” a NetApp spokesperson told SiliconANGLE. “NetApp believes in providing customers with choice in cloud management, including open-source options that provide lower cost, faster innovation, no vendor lock-in, flexibility, and the promotion of standards.”