The U.S federal government’s first ever CIO Vivek Kundra has joined Salesforce as executive vice president of emerging markets.
“Excited to continue disrupting the status quo!” was Kundra’s comment on his new position via Twitter. Chairman and CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff also took to Twitter to welcome Kundra to the company.
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 criticised for his work rapidly pushing federal agencies to use public cloud services rather than investing in their own data centres.
He was very critical of antiquated IT systems that slowed down or hampered federal agencies. He criticised 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. Salesforce did not elaborate on what exactly he’ll do for the company.
