Former CIO of US government joins Salesforce
Another cloud company boosts its public sector expertise
By Anh Nguyen | Computerworld UK | Published 15:30, 16 January 12
Vivek Kundra, the former CIO of the US government, has been appointed executive VP of emerging markets at Salesforce.com.
Kundra has been described as an "early evangelist" of the benefits of cloud computing in the public sector, and wrote the US's Cloud-First policy.
Prior to his US CIO role, Kundra was CTO for the District of Columbia, and also served as assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
He holds a Master's degree in management information systems from the University of Maryland.
Kundra has become part of a recent trend of IT directors moving from government roles to private sector roles at technology companies.
In the UK, for example, the government's deputy CIO Bill McCluggage announced he was leaving to join technology vendor EMC in the first quarter of 2012.
Before this, the UK government's G-Cloud deputy director Andy Tait last year moved to VMware to head up the company's UK public services, while former government CIO John Suffolk joined Chinese telecoms firm Huawei as global security officer in August 2011.
