First Federal CTO is going to be Indian - Padmasree Warrior or Vivek Kundra

As President-elect Obama promised, he is close to appointing the first Federal CTO. Though the initial speculation was around Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Bill Joe etc - the list is down to 2 people now. According to the Business Week article - it could be either Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco Systems (CSCO) or Vivek Kundra, CTO, Government of Washington, D.C..

Here are their proifles(part of the information is taken from Wikipedia):

Padmasree Warrior could be the better choice if Obama considers the technology, innovation. She is the part of lot of innovations including seamless mobility(I was part of this group in 2006) and WiMax. She was the ex-CTO of Motorola where she worked for 23 years and managed the team of 4,600 technologists in Motorola Labs. In 2005 she was promoted to executive vice president and led a team of 26,000 engineers and directed Motorola Labs, with an annual R&D budget of $3.17 billion. Warrior first joined Motorola, Arizona facility in 1984. On December 4, 2007 she left Motorola to become CTO at Cisco Systems. She was born in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India and graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Cornell University.

Vivek Kundra could be the better choice if Obma considers government experience. Kundra was born in India but raised in Tanzania until his family moved to Maryland when he was 11. He previously served as Virginia's Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology in Governor Kaine's cabinet. He has been recognized among the top 25 CTO's in the country and as the 2008 IT Executive of the Year for his pioneering work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower the cost of government operations. In 2007 he assembled the largest United States trade delegation ever to visit India, comprised of over one hundred business leaders, which resulted in a $99 million investment for the state. He has been recognized for interesting work in developing programs to spur open source and crowd sourced applications using publicly accessible Web services from the District of Columbia. His efforts to use cloud-based Web applications in the District government have been considered innovative within government. Mr. Kundra is advising President-elect Barack Obama's transition committee on technology issues. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and holds a MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland.