Thursday, March 05, 2009

Nation's First CIO Has IdM Background

President Obama named Vivek Kundra as the nation's first CIO today. An interesting tidbit caught my eye.
Kundra also worked as vice president of marketing for Evincible Software, which provided electronic signatures and identity management for financial services companies and the Defense Department.
Evincible was acquired by Exostar back in 2004. On their site...

In 2004, Exostar acquired Evincible, a leader in PKI and digital signature technologies and best practices. The acquisition brought both proprietary technologies and leading subject matter experts into the Exostar organization, enabling us to deliver technology, policy and best practices leadership in the areas of PKI, federated identity management and physical and logical assess.
It's going to be interesting to see how his background in identity might influence what's happening in the federal IT space, and current initiatives (that seem to be lagging) to federate gov agencies. Hopefully, he takes identity farther than HSPD-12 did.