SAN FRANCISCO ? Vivek Kundra, who led the Obama administration?s effort to make the federal government act more like a nimble startup than a sluggish bureaucracy, has been hired as an executive for the cloud computing firm Salesforce.com.
As the first U.S. chief information officer ? serving from March 2009 until Aug. 2011, when he left for a Harvard fellowship ? Kundra symbolized the promise and frustrations of the president?s vision to update the government?s use of technology. He oversaw an initiative to cut federal IT costs and bring more information and services to citizens through user-friendly government sites.
Continue ReadingKundra spearheaded the administration?s adoption of a ?cloud first? strategy that sought to cut costs by moving services such as nearly 1 million federal email accounts to shared computer servers. But the plans encountered resistance in some quarters over security concerns.
Kundra also saw his budget curtailed as he tried to roll out revamped federal dot-gov websites to explain agency data, efforts to cut waste and spending to average citizens.
He expressed frustration about the job after he departed in August. ?My neighbor?s ten-year-old could look up the latest stats on his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn?t get an update on how we were spending billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars while at my desk at the White House,? he wrote on a Harvard website.
Kundra attacked federal government technology projects as being controlled by ?the IT cartel,? big vendors that consistently win federal IT contracts. He called on the administration to apply ?Darwinian pressure? on the sector.
Over the past five months, Kundra has held a joint appointment at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The White House tapped Steven VanRoekel, an executive director for citizen engagement at USAID who had spent many years as an executive at Microsoft, to replace Kundra.
Kundra has a long career in technology leadership roles in Virginia state and county government, as well as chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. He will be Salesforce.com?s executive vice president of emerging markets and based at the company?s San Francisco headquarters.
"Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing," Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com?s chairman and chief executive, said in a press release. "His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise."
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