In something of a surprise move, Cloud supplier Salesforce.com has appointed America’s first CIO, Vivek Kundra to a post as its VP of Emerging Markets.
Kundra left the White House last year after a successful stint which included driving the idea of Cloud onto both the national and international public sector agenda, as well as strengthening the cybersecurity posture of the US and launching an open government movement.
He was appointed by President Obama to shake up the US government’s $80bn public sector ICT landscape, but left for a role at Harvard University. Now he has gone into private industry for the first time in his career.
His new boss, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, praised him as “an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of Cloud Computing” and whose “disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.” For his part, Kundraadded:
Kundra’s federal government experience will doubtless come in handy for Salesforce.com as it tackles both its expansion in the sector in the US and also its ambitions to address the emerging UK public sector Cloud Computing market now that the G-Cloud strategy has been published. Kundra holds a master’s degree in management information systems from the University of Maryland and is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute of Political Leadership.
The former Obama IT chief appeared last year at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where he joined a panel to discuss the impact of Cloud on the global political and economic structure:
