Kundra, first CIO of US, joins Salesforce

Vivek Kundra

Salesforce on Monday said that Vivek Kundra, who was the first person to serve as CIO of the U.S. federal government, has joined the company as executive vice president of emerging markets.

Salesforce did not elaborate beyond Kundra’s title about what he’ll do for the company. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chairman and CEO, welcomed Kundra via Twitter and called him the company’s new leader of government and emerging markets.

Kundra also took to Twitter to note his new job. “Excited to continue disrupting the status quo!” he wrote.

Kundra announced in June that he would resign as CIO of the federal government after two and a half years at the post. He has been both praised and criticized for his work rapidly pushing federal agencies to use public cloud services rather than investing in their own data centers.

He was blatantly critical of antiquated IT systems that slowed down or hampered federal agencies. He criticized expensive and useless IT security reports commissioned by the State Department, a paper-based filing system used by the government’s personnel management agency, and wasteful IT projects at the Veterans Administration, among others.

After he left his post as CIO, Kundra served a joint fellowship at Harvard University.

Prior to joining the federal government, he was the CTO for the District of Columbia and was also the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for Virginia.

Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com

Recommended reading

• Cloud computing and governance in the digital age - Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, sits down with industry leaders
• Steven VanRoekel will succeed Kundra as US CIO
• Is this the toughest CIO gig on the planet? - Insights from the first Federal CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra]]

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