Kundra takes executive post with cloud services provider

Former first U.S. CIO left administration last summer to attend Harvard.

Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first CIO, has joined Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets.

The company announced the appointment on Jan. 16, without providing any specifics about Kundra’s new duties.

On his first day on the new job Monday, Kundra tweeted, “Excited to continue disrupting the status quo.”

As the first U.S. CIO, Kundra managed more than $80 billion in technology investments at one of the world’s largest IT organizations.

Kundra left the Obama administration in August 2011 to accept an academic fellowship at Harvard University.

An early proponent of the benefits of cloud computing in the public sector, he was the author of Cloud First, which now serves as a model for government IT organizations seeking to increase efficiencies with fewer resources, the announcement said.

Kundra also published a 25-point implementation plan to improve how the federal government manages information technology.

Before serving as the nation’s CIO, Kundra was the CTO of Washington, D.C. Before that, he served as assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud-computing company in San Francisco.