Kundra Joins Cloud Provider Salesforce.com

Former federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra is the new executive vice president of emerging markets at Salesforce.com, the cloud provider and government contractor announced Monday.

Kundra, who was the nation's first official CIO, left government in August to take a fellowship at Harvard University.

While in office, Kundra bemoaned what he called "the federal IT cartel", a collection of companies that knew the contracting game inside and out and dominated the federal information technology market. He often praised Salesforce, though, as one of a number of slick new entrants that were democratizing that market.

In a press release announcing his appointment, Kundra called Salesforce "an industry disruptor, helping organizations use the transformative power of technology for change" and "the most innovative company in the world that is pioneering social, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the enterprise."

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called Kundra "an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing" and praised his "disruptive leadership."

It was unclear whether Kundra would continue his work at Harvard.