Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra warned of “an IT cartel” of vendors in a discussion with President Barack Obama and his scientific advisors on Friday, according to a report from Network World.
During a talk with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Kundra, whose appearance can be streamed here, spoke ill of government IT contractors. Kundra hinted that there was currently something akin to an IT cartel; a group comprised of several select companies that are thriving off of the government’s dime.
“It’s not because they provide better technology,” Kundra added.
Kundra encouraged the consolidation of federal systems by reducing some of the 12,000 in operation today. To help, the CIO theorized some of the country’s data systems could be cut down, ideally trimming the current number, 2,000, down to just three.
Kundra, a noted advocate of open source infrastructure, data sharing and the cloud is leaving his office in August to take an academic fellowship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
