alumni Spotlight: d. raja
D. Raja is the co-founder of Computer Enterprises, Inc., better known as CEI. Originally from Bangalore, India, Raja underwent his schooling in Chennai. He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Anna University, India. Raja moved to the United States from India to obtain his M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. While he was still pursuing his Masters, Raja began his professional career as a software engineer. He worked for over five years at Formtek, a Lockheed Company, where he quickly scaled the ranks from software engineer to manager of the software department. In 1992, while still working for Formtek, Raja launched his own consulting and project management practice, a venture that was to become CEI. In addition to his successful, 14-year career as an entrepreneur in the software development and project management sector, Raja recently earned an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. Out of the office, Raja spends quality time at his home in Mt. Lebanon with his wife, Neeta, and his daughter, Isana.
About CEI (www.ceiamerica.com)
CEI is a nationally recognized strategy, technology architecture, and software consulting company. Established in 1992 with the vision of becoming a global leader in IT services, CEI has grown to a $35 million company with over 400 employees and offices coast to coast and in India. CEI provides contract programming, technical project management and eBusiness integration services to clients across the United States, including over 60% of the Fortune 50. The company has been named three times consecutively to both the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing private companies and the Smart 100 list of America’s most innovative IT service providers. The company is also a five-time Pittsburgh Technology Council Tech 50 honoree and has been recognized by VARBusiness as one of the country’s top 500 solution providers. CEI’s service line has developed through the full spectrum of technology, from its beginnings as a client/server company to ERP and Internet technologies of today. The company presently offers quality services in a full range of key IT focus areas, including on-site, off-site and offshore project delivery, managed services, and staff augmentation in almost any application of current and emerging technologies. CEI prides itself on staying ahead of the technology innovation curve and is an active partner to some of the market’s best technology innovators, including IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Documentum and ATG.
Industry Trends
The IT Industry has evolved over the past two years to focus on consolidation, cost cutting and employee productivity. With this as a business driver for CxO’s, server and application consolidation are important for business buyers. Cost cutting has allowed IT buyers to look at Open Source (Linux) as a way to achieve the savings. Application consolidation is promoting the need to merge multiple ERP and JAVA-based application servers (i.e. IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic) and extend a common platform. From a business perspective, blended offshore outsourcing in technology services and business services (BPO) is being reviewed as another way to decrease costs as businesses focuses on core competencies. Employee productivity is being promoted by enabling employees to make better decisions by providing the key information to them through the use of portals (i.e. IBM Portal, Microsoft Sharepoint) and collaboration technologies such as business-based instant messaging (i.e. IBM Sametime). Going forward, CEI sees a new focus on revenue-generating top-line growth initiatives that will happen as companies refresh their old technologies (i.e. Microsoft NT to .NET 2003). New initiatives such as web services and embedded security will allow additional revenue opportunities for all companies. RFID for product tracking will create optimal supply chain tracking combined with customers, suppliers and employees using multiple devices for information access.
