Sekhar Prabhakar worked for several years in Silicon Valley before moving to St. Louis when his wife took a job here. It was in St. Louis that he remembered his father’s dream for him to be an entrepreneur. So he started a consulting company and has since discovered the joy of being involved with clients and their ever-evolving needs.
CEdge focuses on four main activities, Sekhar explains: project-based consulting, staffing, reselling enterprise software and hardware, and selling their own products, which include a data-analytics product and a cyber security product.
CEdge has grown organically over time to include services from developing enterprise architectures, solutions integration, operational support of a network environment, and maintaining a totally secure IT infrastructure. In all these areas, their calling is to provide innovative solutions. Oftentimes, says Sekhar, companies want to “do the cookie-cutter model,” and will do the same thing over and over again. CEdge, meanwhile, having always taken on a diverse range of projects, finds innovative solutions due to their diverse subject matter expertise.
CEdge takes pride in their extremely well-trained workforce, who provide hard-to-find subject matter expertise. “Some of these folks are published authors,” says Sekhar. “Many have worked on million- to billion-dollar projects.”
Additionally, CEdge is a CMMI Level 3 company, so the team makes sure their processes are well documented, which facilitates top-notch service delivery.
In St. Louis, Sekhar sees a great ecosystem for startups. CEdge is plugged into corporate citizenship related activities. They support K-12 education and are involved in creating and funding internships. Sekhar devotes part of his time to mentoring startups through accelerators and is a board member at ITEN.
Sekhar is proud, too, of the way CEdge’s size allows them to take advantage of emerging technologies larger firms are too conservative to capitalize on. “Big firms are afraid to take a risk,” he says. “We, on the other hand, when we see a new technology, are not afraid to try it out. We’re light, nimble.”
“By the time emerging technologies become mainstream, they’re more difficult and more expensive to modify,” Sekhar explains. “When you get in early, you’ve already helped shape the product specifically for your customers, which is a much better value for them.”
Sekhar offers an example: “While we were working with Hybris, an e-commerce software, they were bought by SAP. It became one of the de facto standards of e-commerce software, and so many large companies jumped on the bandwagon. But we had successful implementations from the very beginning, and because we were there early, we were already masters of it.”
CEdge is growing. They have recently become part of the NGA (National Geospatial Agency) as a subcontractor, and are part of a $855M contract for artificial intelligence and machine learning. They also landed part of a large IT transformation contract with IRS, becoming one of the subcontractors on a $1 billion contract.
The advantage of CEdge, according to Sekhar, is that they have become experts at adapting, which he says should be done regularly and vigilantly, lest you increase what you’ll have to spend when you migrate to them later. “New products are made to be compatible with the latest technologies, so if your whole system is based on old technologies, the amount of new technologies you’re missing out on becomes compounded.”
“The question becomes,” says Sekhar, “do you want to keep using the legacy system just because you’re afraid to move? Or do you want to take advantage of everything that’s available to you?”
To get in touch with CEdge, visit cedgecorp.com.
C-Edge Software Consultants is a CMMI Level 3 and MBE/DBE certified technology firm providing full spectrum IT consulting and staffing services to government and commercial enterprises nationwide. From agile software development and data analytics, to e-commerce and enterprise architecture, CEdge’s niche is the areas that form the very heart of any small, medium, or large enterprise.
