Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Former CIO of the United States Vivek Kundra Joins Salesforce.com

Being a cloud evangelist on the President’s cabinet appears to have made Vivek Kundra an attractive prospect for the private sector. Salesforce.com has just announced that it has hired him as its EVP of emerging markets.

When we last saw Kundra, he had stepped down from his position as Chief Information Officer of the United States, to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. Having proposed between $5 billion and $20 billion in savings from the federal information technology budget — which, at $80 billion annually, is the biggest IT budget on the planet — he left government in June for a teaching stint at Harvard University.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised Kundra in a statement: “Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing … His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”

And, naturally, Kundra had nice things to say about Salesforce: “Salesforce.com is an industry disruptor, helping organizations use the transformative power of technology for change … I am excited to join the most innovative company in the world that is pioneering social, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the enterprise.”

The statement is a little short on what Kundra’s job will actually entail. And emerging markets, at least geographically, aren’t exactly Salesforce’s strength.

For the year ended last Jan. 31, Salesforce reported sales of $1.7 billion, of which nearly $1.2 billion, or almost 70 percent, was derived from customers in the Americas; Europe and Asia accounted for 17 percent and 13 percent of sales, respectively. So, perhaps his brief will be to boost those numbers a bit.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik