Earlier today Vivek Kundra was named the new Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets at Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a leader in cloud-computing and CRM solutions, headquartered in San Francisco, California. Kundra will be traveling extensively, but his home office will be in Herndon, Virginia.
Vivek Kundra previously served as the first Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) under President Obama, a position that required management of $80 billion in IT federal spending. After serving for two and a half years, Kundra left his post for a Fellowship position at Harvard University.
Kundra’s legacy as first CIO includes a laundry list of IT initiatives, most notable the “Cloud First Policy.” Under the Obama Administration’s promise to bring transparency and openness to the American public, Kundra gave us USA.gov, Recovery.gov and the Federal IT Dashboard. Arguably, Kundra’s greatest legacy as the first Federal CIO is saving the United States government $3 billion dollars through creating a better tracking process of federal IT programs.
Vivek Kundra most recently made headlines with his New York Times opinion piece. Kundra wrote about the private contracting “I.T. cartel.” Read more about his belief that embracing the cloud will help solve the budget crisis here.
Kundra said via Twitter today: “Excited to continue disrupting the status quo! #FirstDay @salesforce/ht @benioff”
Steve VanRoekel is our nations current Federal CIO. Read more about VanRoekel’s plans to save the government $5 billion in IT spending by 2015 here.
“Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff. “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”
- Click here to see what industry leaders are saying about Vivek Kundra’s legacy as the first Federal CIO
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Vivek is a creative thinker who brought many valuable ideas to the federal government. In his role as Federal CIO and previously as Virginia Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology, he was a strong supporter of NVTC and a great asset to the Northern Virginia technology community. We look forward to working with Vivek now that he is officially a member of our technology business community.
–Bobbie Kilberg, President & CEO, Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC)