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.

Kundra carried a bit of a reputation as a wunderkind. Born in New Delhi, reared in Tanzania before moving to the Washington, D.C., area, and fluent in Swahili, Hindi and English, he hit perfectly the ideal of the bright young minds marching into Washington after the 2008 election, seeking to cast out the crusty defenders of the seemingly incurable institutional inertia for which the nation’s capital is infamous and leave in its place a government whose parts looked shiny and new.

A big problem with the federal government, he said in the final days of the Bush-to-Obama transition, was that “process had trumped outcome.” Complying with the rules made it near impossible to spur innovation within the halls of government. His brief as he assumed office in early 2009 was to change that.

Today he announced plans to step down and take a position at Harvard University, where he will be a joint fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. (See Harvard’s statement here.) So what was the overall effect of his two years and change in office?

As the CTO of the government of the District of Columbia, he famously adopted Google Apps and did away with Microsoft Office as that body’s standard office suite for its 38,000 employees. A similar effort to bring Google Apps to federal agencies quickly got messy as it devolved into a squabble between Microsoft and Google.

On other fronts, Kundra sought to inject the kind of common sense to which official Washington has often been resistant. He loosened rules on government-issued wireless phones because federal employees hated the devices they were being given, approving iPhones and BlackBerrys and even the occasional iPad for use at federal agencies, provided they could be made secure.

Ostensibly in charge of some $80 billion in information technology spending — arguably the largest IT budget in the world — he aimed to make agencies more accountable for their spending. He launched an IT spending dashboard intended to allow people to see for themselves how money was being spent. The result was about what you’d expect: Many federal IT projects were over budget, behind schedule, not delivering the needed result or some combination of all three. He ordered some cut back, others killed.

Openness and transparency, constant bywords of the early Obama presidency, were made real by Data.gov, paymentaccuracy.gov and USASpending.gov. Citizens could, in theory, look in on the spending of their tax dollars with no more effort than that required for a Google search. In coming weeks, these and other sites like them will either freeze or go dark entirely, having lost their funding. Some of these included sites in Kundra’s portfolio.

A convert to the new religion of cloud computing, he announced last month plans to move 78 different government programs that today account for $20 billion in spending to cloud-based services in order to save $5 billion a year. He talked about the plan at length with AllThingsD on May 25.

The amount of savings at first seems impressive but it really isn’t. A $5 billion reduction in spending considered in the context of the $3.8 trillion budget amounts to less than one fifth of 1 percent of federal outlays. What’s not clear is whether the cloudward shift in government he has proposed yields a wider return on investment beyond mere financial savings.

The fundamental mission of IT is to enable people to get more work done faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost than before. Will federal workers become faster, more productive and more effectual if and when Kundra’s cloud is fully operational? Will government, as a result, become even slightly more responsive to the people in whose name it exists? Time will tell, but we can only hope. Making sure that happens will be the task of the next CIO of the United States — that is, if there is to be one at all.

But when you consider that the federal government collectively buys more information technology than any other organization on the planet, technology companies that hope to win some of that business sit up and take notice.

This year, the government will spend $80 billion on IT, at agencies as varied as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, and on non-classified sections of the US Department of Defense. As slices of government spending go, this is not huge, amounting to about 2 percent of the federal budget, but not trivial either. As has usually been the case, the government spends more (about $3.8 trillion in 2011) than it brings in via tax revenue (about $2.2 trillion in 2011). With Congress and the President wrestling over extending the debt ceiling, every dollar spent becomes a politically-charged particle of a wider debate over the appropriate role of government in our society.

The one thing that pretty much anyone–whether they’re a politician, a member of the Washington bureaucracy, or a humble taxpayer–can agree on is that when a dollar is spent, it should be done effectively and productively. Kundra’s job is to whip government agencies into shape around IT spending, and make them think more like private companies in planning that spending.

A keystone of his plan is to push federal agencies to embrace, where possible and appropriate, the cost-savings and efficiency that come from cloud computing. Today he’s released exclusively to AllThingsD a list of 78 different government projects and services that have been identified for a shift to the cloud. Requests for proposals–RFPs, the documents through which government agencies seek bids from the private sector–are either already written or soon to be released. The list is embedded below.

In it you can see the breadth of the federal commitment to the cloud. For example: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would like to move 25,000 email and calendar accounts to a cloud service. The Department of Homeland Security would like to move 100,000 email accounts and 90,000 collaboration accounts to a secure private cloud-based system. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wants to move 7,500 users based in 260 offices to a cloud-based system.

For a glance at the inner-workings of government, the list is enlightening reading, because the needs are so workaday. We often hear about the costs of multi-billion-dollar weapons systems that the Department of Defense wants for fighting wars both underway and imagined in the future. But even generals have to watch their travel budgets. What does the DOD want from the cloud? Among other things, a Web-based trip-cost estimator.

Kundra says the 78 items identified amount to the first batch of what, when combined with many more systems to be identified later, amount to a combined $20 billion worth of IT spending now. At minimum, he expects that the agencies involved will save a minimum of $5 billion in the next year by making these changes, but he really hopes they’ll save a lot more. And you might think that $5 billion saved is $5 billion that no longer has to be spent. It’s actually more complicated than that. Dollars saved from unproductive projects can be moved toward more productive ones. The demand for IT in government, as in every other aspect in life, is not going down anytime soon. We talked about this yesterday.

AllThingsD: So a lot of people don’t know that the U.S. has a CIO. What does the CIO of the United States do?

Kundra: One of the things President Obama did right after the election was set up a transition team that focused on technology information and government reform. He created the first CIO role which I’m honored to serve in. And I’m basically managing four big areas. One, I make sure we’re effectively managing the $80 billion we spend on IT every year, and that we’re going after wasteful spending. We were able to save $3 billion by terminating poorly performing projects and turning around those that weren’t working. Second is to run the operation efficiently. Here’s an interesting data point. The number of data centers the federal government runs grew from 432 in 1999 to 2,094 this year. I just announced two weeks ago that we’re shutting down 137 of them this year, and we’ll shut down 800 data centers by 2015, cutting the number by 40 percent. That’s going to fundamentally change how we deploy technology as we shift services to the cloud. My third big area is cybersecurity. I’m very focused on making sure we’re protecting federal systems, and in the context of a world with nation states that target federal systems and organized crime going after critical infrastructure that we have in place policies built around actively protecting our systems. Fourth, I’m focused on creating an open and transparent and participatory government.

So tell me about your goals and expectations by moving government IT projects to the cloud?

First let me give you a little context. On my first day on the job, I convened a CIO Council made up of the CIOs from all the federal agencies, from the Department of Defense to Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Homeland Security. I stated as an administration priority to move away from an IT model based on owning the assets to a model that is focused on service provisioning. Later, in September of 2009, I flew out to the NASA Ames Research Center in California, and I challenged the private sector, by saying that we are looking to lower the cost of government operations and are interested in innovative technologies in cloud computing. I was trying to answer a simple question: I was seeing all these innovations in consumer technology and how low-cost it was compared to what was happening in the federal government, where for years we had been spending billions of dollars and had little to show in terms of productivity gains. The great thing about competitive markets was that companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM all came forth with .gov cloud products. And companies that had never competed for federal business before like Amazon and Salesforce.com all started coming in and disrupting the traditional IT model.

That must be ruffling feathers. I think pretty much everyone assumes that the federal government IT establishment is this big lumbering inefficient giant that’s slow to embrace change and innovation.

Absolutely, and unfortunately it has led to billions of dollars in wasteful and duplicative spending. And we haven’t benefited from the innovation that is taking place in the private sector, especially in the consumer space. Just to give you a data point, on something as simple as email: The General Services Administration, which is in the process of moving to Google Apps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture which is in the process of moving to Microsoft Azure, just by moving email to those cloud services we were able to save $40 million. Imagine what we can do if we start moving billions of dollars worth of spending on other things like our financial systems. Imagine what we might save if we fundamentally re-think how we deploy IT across the federal government.

So you’ve selected some agencies that are moving various aspects of their operation to the cloud?

Yes. I required every department to pick three systems that they could move to the cloud within the next year. So what you’re seeing in this document is the list of 78 systems that these agencies are going to be moving. (Document below.) You can see the diversity of the projects, whether it’s capital planning software, to geospatial solutions to collaboration to human resource management solutions. This is a very exciting time in the public sector. We’re unleashing the cloud revolution and we’re backed by billions of dollars to do it.

So how much do you think you can save?

We’ve identified up to $20 billion worth of IT spending that can move to the cloud. That’s out of the total federal IT budget of about $80 billion. So out of that we’ve identified about $20 billion worth of spending that can move to the cloud. And we won’t know how much we’ll save until the procurements are done because you have to go through the competitive bidding process, but we think that out of that $20 billion we could easily save $5 billion or more. So that’s the minimum in savings we’re looking for.

Now I say this as the son of a retired career federal employee: Government projects, especially around IT, never quite go as planned. They always seem to be late, they always seem to go over budget. Is that a likely scenario here?

There’s lots of examples like that. There’s the Department of Defense’s enterprise human resources system that took 12 years and a billion dollars to build and it never worked. What we’re doing here is moving to a new model that adopts consumer technologies. If you go back to the 1960s, the government was the center of gravity when it came to innovation and technology. You would come to the federal government to get access to the most groundbreaking and innovative technologies. In the 1980s that leadership role moved to the private sector, where enterprises had the best technologies. In 2005 you started to see all the megatrends around storage and software converge in the consumer space, whether it was around mobile communications or search technology or financial systems. Part of what we’re trying to do is make sure the federal government isn’t frozen in time.

So in an age where everyone in government is concerned about cutting budgets right and left, you’ve got a big $80 billion piece of the federal budget in your portfolio. Where would you like that number to be ideally?

Here’s the biggest challenge. We spend $80 billion right now, and part of it is that we’re spending it in the wrong place. It’s not that we’re spending too much. If you look at the American people, how they interact with the federal government, it isn’t as convenient as buying a book on Amazon or booking a restaurant on Opentable or making a flight reservation on Expedia. And that’s because everyone is spending all these dollars from the departmental perspective on redundant and duplicative infrastructure. Part of what we’re doing is moving away from that and moving toward high value work. Second, if you look at the next five years, the federal governement and society in general is going to create more digital content and information than it has since the dawn of human history. So the demand for IT is growing exponentially. The demand is going up.

So how do you measure progress? The White House has always portrayed this administration as being very data-driven, and intent on pursuing work that shows productive results. What determines success?

There’s the $3 billion saved from terminated projects that we talked about, and then the $5 billion or more from cloud projects. Then more savings from shutting down and consolidating our data centers. And we’re going to sell off the assets and real estate that we’re not using. We’ve also committed that we’re going to either turn around or terminate one third of the IT portfolio that is under-performing. These are projects that are millions of dollars over budget or years behind schedule. There’s no time to continue projects that aren’t yielding dividends that the American people have a right to expect.

IT Reform Agency Cloud Migrations

In video released by The White House today, he talks about the IT spending by the federal government. Naturally, lots of projects are behind schedule and over budget. In 2009, the government launched an IT Dashboard that was meant to expose all the government’s bit IT projects to the light of day and review them. Kundra tells us that out of 38 projects reviewed, four were canceled and 11 were reduced in scope for a total savings of $3 billion.

Clearly the government has a bit of a problem spending its IT funds effectively. The dashboard is the public face of a review process that helped get some of that spending under control. It brings some accountability to the federal IT process, adding the name and photo of the agency CIO responsible.

Using this dashboard tool, The Obama Administration says it has identified under-performing high priority IT projects, which in turn brought them under intensive review. Projects that had run too far off the rails were cut off, others were re-jiggered. The result, the government says, has cut in half the time it takes to finish projects like new biometric technologies for law enforcement and easy access to cargo inspection systems for Border Control agents.

I certainly sympathize, having seen IT projects in the private sector spin out of control relatively easily, but yikes. The taxpayer in me doesn’t like the size of the amounts being thrown around. One thing I have to wonder about, since Kundra doesn’t address it, is personnel ramifications. In the private sector, when you can’t manage your projects and budgets effectively, you lose your job. Did that happen here? Or are the same people responsible for running massive IT projects that weren’t delivered on time or on budget going to be in charge of the next one?

Kundra said in a panel discussion in Washington DC yesterday that the government plans to give detailed reports on the state of its IT spending every six months as part of a 25-point IT reform plan he put forth last year. The plan includes extra flexibility in spending decisions for federal CIOs, and a strategy to shift about $20 billion in federal IT spending to cloud services.

Announced at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, the IT dashboard, allows users to view data for various federal agencies, including major investments and dollars spent, as well to view the “health” of projects through graphs comparing planned and actual expenditures.

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Aneesh Chopra, currently Virginia’s secretary of technology, got the nod and will soon join his former colleague Vivek Kundra, the national chief information officer, on a team tasked with using technology to make government more efficient. “Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities–from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure,” Obama said in his Saturday radio address.

“Aneesh and Jeffrey [Zients, the newly appointed chief innovation officer] will work closely with our chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, who is responsible for setting technology policy across the government, and using technology to improve security, ensure transparency, and lower costs,” he said. During the campaign, the high tech community buzzed about who might fill the CTO slot, which the campaign suggested would be cabinet-level position.

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BoomTown was there Thursday when Facebook announced a new look for profiles and homepages that incorporates a “timeline” or “stream” of realtime updates. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it.” It’s also reminiscent of some other sites, not that it’ll matter much in the long run. Speaking of Twitter, BoomTown got impatient waiting around for its revenue strategy to materialize and went ahead and started a “Twitter Business Plan Count-Up.” The Chia-Twit has potential, but the winning financial strategy so far, by a mile, is the “Snuggie-Tweet.” BoomTown describes it best.

MediaMemo was all (well, almost all) about old media vs. new media. This week. Hulu, which lets you watch Fox and NBC shows on your computer, has been playing tug-of-war with Boxee, which lets you watch Web video on your TV. Hulu and its TV programmer owners don’t really want you to have that option–the resulting standoff could be long and interesting. MediaMemo also reported on MegaVideo, the Chinese site that makes it easy to watch pirated TV shows and movies online, noting that Hollywood’s Napster moment has probably just arrived. Universal Music Group–which has already had its share of Napster moments–is discussing a music site with YouTube. According to MediaMemo, it would be the most likely way to benefit both YouTube and UMG–not to mention music fans.

Digital Daily must be getting tired of that same old economic refrain. Among the highlights of this week’s crappy news: the jobless rate in Silicon Valley is at 9.3 percent and getting higher. At least Google (GOOG) may be getting some big love soon–Vivek Kundra, President Obama’s chief information officer, famously switched 38,000 workers from Microsoft Office to Google’s Web-based office suite as chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. No word yet on office software for the new White House, but here’s hoping for a more secure Google Docs. DD also noted the lack of a release date for Palm’s (PALM) new Pre from Sprint (S). Apparently it’ll be a while longer before anyone finds out if the Pre really is an iPhone-killer.

On the Personal Technology front, Walt Mossberg gave Apple’s (AAPL) new Safari browser a mixed review, and offered his first impressions of Kindle software on the iPhone. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about reading periodicals on Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle 2, keeping a monitor from going to sleep in the middle of a movie, and the benefits of a netbook for traveling. And in the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took an early look at a new Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace, and reported on its pros and cons.

Spring forward. More next week.

Kundra, who has served as a technology policy adviser for President Obama, will oversee federal technology spending, among other things. “Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position,” Obama said in a statement. “I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.”

If stories about Kundra’s enthusiasm for Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) products are any indication, we can expect to see some big changes in the way federal technology spending is handled. “One of the biggest problems in government is that process has trumped outcome,” Kundra once said. “As everyone is focused on compliance, no one is thinking about innovation.”

Kundra, who has served as a technology policy adviser for President Obama, will oversee federal technology spending, among other things. “Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position,” Obama said in a statement. “I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.”

If stories about Kundra’s enthusiasm for Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) products are any indication, we can expect to see some big changes in the way federal technology spending is handled. “One of the biggest problems in government is that process has trumped outcome,” Kundra once said. “As everyone is focused on compliance, no one is thinking about innovation.”