News
Former Microsoft, VMware CIO Hired by White House
- By Jeffrey Schwartz
- February 09, 2015
Tony Scott, a former chief information officer of Microsoft and VMware, is now CIO of the U.S. federal government, according to a statement by the White House last week.
Scott, who served as Microsoft CIO from 2008 to 2013, was most recently the CIO of virtualization giant VMware, which he left last Friday after 18 months. He has also served as CIO of Disney and CTO of General Motors.
Scott will only be the third person charged with overseeing the nation's overall IT infrastructure, succeeding Steve VanRoekel. The first CIO was Vivek Kundra, who launched the government's Cloud First initiative.
Scott's official title will be U.S. CIO and Administrator of OMB's Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology. The Obama administration will task Scott with implementing the Smarter IT Delivery agenda outlined in the president's 2016 proposed budget.
In a 2010 interview at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington, D.C., Scott said that among his key initiatives as Microsoft's CIO was enabling the internal use of new technologies that Microsoft had recently brought to market, including Azure.
"I think we've done what Microsoft always has done traditionally, which is we try to dog-food our own stuff and get the bugs out and make sure the functionality is there," he said during the interview, though he qualified that by adding: "We'll move them or migrate them as the opportunity arises and as the business case makes sense."
Nevertheless, Scott was known as a proponent of cloud-enabling internal applications as quickly as possible.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.