By Jim Baer
Sekhar Prabhakar, one of three principal owners of CEdge Software Consultants, harkens back to his early days in IT consulting in California's Silicon Valley.
He cut his teeth working for SyBase and Sun Microsystems in professional services and one thing in particular sticks in his mind about that phase of his career. "I just hated to get paged over the intercom system. I began to take complete responsibility for
my projects and made sure they were 100 percent so I wouldn't be getting paged over the system. One time I was taking my
family for a nice day out to the St. Louis
Zoo and I was paged. I just hated that," he recalls laughing.
CEdge stands for Cutting Edge and this startup company, based in Creve Coeur is on the prowl for local IT consulting contracts. Their target market is large St. Louis companies and manufacturing companies.
He founded the company in 2004, along with his brother in Chicago, and CEdge has offices in Chicago, Minneapolis and St. Louis.
Altogether, roughly 33 consultants presently work for CEdge. Born in India, and educated at Nagpur University, Mahrasyra, India, he earned his masters degree from City College in New York. His goal is getting this St. Louis operation recognized and off the ground. "It takes time to get your name known around St. Louis in this business. I spend a lot of my time networking through the Regional Chamber and Growth Association (RCGA) and through the Minority Business Council."
He looks back to the dot com era in San Jose and Freemont, Calif. when contracts flowed like water through a spigot. "This is a challenging place to land contracts. Everything is process oriented and companies often are afraid to try new things," he says. "Sometimes they (companies) worry that small vendors like us will just fail."
The company does contract work for giants IBM and United Airlines. "We'd like to do work for Boeing for instance. You cannot imagine how much technical work is done there before that aircraft ever comes out the door." Their target market for new clients is in healthcare, finance, insurance, real estate, airlines, manufacturing, architecture and logistics. They seek contracts ranging from startup and venture capitalists all the way to Fortune 500 companies.
Prabhakar, his wife and children ages nine and three love St. Louis and are quickly becoming a fabric of the local community. He does volunteer work for the IT Coalition and for local Disabled Veteran causes. "Everyone in my family was either a policeman or in the military, so I am partial to that service," he says.
Prabhakar is putting a lot of stock into his employee base. Right now, highly-skilled IT consultants readily find work in Boston and in the Silicon Valley.
"We want our workers to remain in
St. Louis. This is a great community. We
have very good schools and this is a really nice place to raise a family. There's a
generally low cost of living and everything seems like it's within a 30 mile range,"
he estimates.
"We are always looking for quality people. We find them at various networking events and various job sites. We look for new hires with both managerial and technical experience. Since we are seeking government contracts, we need workers with U.S. citizenships and top secret clearances." Prabhakar, who became a U.S. citizen himself in 2006, says their goal is hiring as much local talent as the market will permit. "We are able to put junior resources with senior resources for knowledge transfer," he says.
"We want to retain talented people and we offer them a value for working for us. Our relationship can be as much social as business. It's kind of like a marriage between employees and the company,"
he explains. "We certainly don't just take money from our clients and put it into
our pockets. We invest a great deal in
the pay and benefits for our workers," he says, revealing the company's strategy for future growth.
The primary goal of CEdge Consulting is helping small/medium business solution practices increase their revenues and market share at lower costs. They leverage the power of information technology by delivering turnkey solutions via application and infrastructure outsourcing using a fixed price/fixed time model. Their success is directly linked to the commitment of their people and they measure their success by the customer's overall success.
CEdge Solutions provides end-to-end solutions in Application Value Management. CEdge combines technical, process and strategic IT consulting expertise to enable overall business transformation. Their current business partners include Redhat, Sun Microsystems and Imanami.
The company may be lean and mean and new. But they are very serious about their service and expertise for the growing IT industry. Only thing is, Sekhar Prabhakar would rather own than work for a consulting company, so that explains exactly why he is where he is today at this juncture of his career. However, he has just one wish:
please keep that intercom pager turned off, if at all possible.
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