Office of Technology Services chief Robert Schmidt won the endorsement Monday of the Senate Rules Committee, which sent his nomination to the full Senate for final approval.
After a long hearing focused on two other appointees, lawmakers voted 5-0 to approve Schmidt’s nomination with no debate.
Schmidt has headed the Office of Technology Services (OTech) at the Department of Technology since Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the role in September 2015. The Senate has a year to act on his nomination.
As OTech chief, Schmidt oversees about 600 staff and a budget of more than $300 million. Among his top priorities is the migration of state agencies and departments to the state’s private cloud, known as CalCloud. The state has added 60 government entities as customers and is adding more vendor-hosted solutions in an effort to attract more users to the cloud.
The office also provisions servers, application hosting, telecommunications and other IT services for approximately 500 customers in state and local government and education.
Prior to his appointment, Schmidt was the agency CIO. He also has served as director of Executive Office/IT Services at Food and Agriculture, and principal of statewide IT consolidation at the Department of Technology. He worked as a system software specialist at the California Franchise Tax Board and at the California Department of Technology, according to the governor’s office.
Schmidt earned an MBA from California State University, Sacramento, and recently studied innovation at Stanford.
Schmidt replaced Davood Ghods at OTech.
