Former chief information officer of the United States Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce as its executive vice president for emerging markets. Kundra, who was the first ever CIO of the U.S., left the position in the summer of 2011 to join Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with a six-month fellowship. He joins Salesforce at a time when cloud computing is ready to be pushed across the world, a job he is specifically suited for.
President Barack Obama created the position of federal CIO when he came to office in 2009. Under Kundra’s stewardship, the U.S. government made a concerted effort to streamline its IT policies and procedures and make it more transparent. He managed the Data.gov and IT Dashboard initiatives (which has subsequently lost most of its funding) and the leader in moving the federal infrastructure to cloud computing, leading the effort to shut down several hundred data centers.
Kundra’s lasting legacy for federal IT is his “25-point plan.” His goal was to cut back on U.S. IT spending by making the process more efficient and implementing new technologies, such as cloud computing. Kundra oversaw a budget of nearly $80 billion while the U.S. CIO.
Before moving up to the White House, Kundra was the CIO of the District of Columbia under Mayor Adrian Fenty and previous to that the secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Kundra will be a good fit for Salesforce. As the EVP for emerging markets, there are few people more qualified to spread the word of cloud computing and its cost benefits than Kundra. He was, in concert with former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, one of the biggest drivers of NASA’s Nebula cloud computing system that became the foundation for OpenStack.
Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce in a press release. “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”