Praveen Nedungottil
Chief Technology Officer/Partner at The Cadmus Group
McLean, Virginia, United States
About Praveen Nedungottil
Praveen Nedungottil is Chief Technology Officer/Partner at The Cadmus Group. Location: McLean, Virginia, United States.
I have spent my career turning "this cannot be done" into "what is next." Growing up, my idols were my uncle and Christiaan Barnard, and I was captivated by the idea of making heart transplants accessible to people who could not afford. Medicine felt like the path, until it became one I could not afford. I was born a tinkerer...so I fell headfirst into programming, teaching myself C and Fortran, when nobody made it look glamorous and more than a few people told me this was not a field for someone like me. My life philosophy is simple: possibility starts with someone telling you that you cannot do it. What I came to understand is that the mission never changed. Technology, like medicine, is about improving lives. That belief has driven three decades of building things that never existed and using technology to make life easier for real people. Whether reimagining public services, leading organizations through their hardest digital moments, or building teams people are proud to be part of, I show up with purpose, stay grounded in people, and never settle for average. I have lived through every major wave of transformation in this industry. I was in the trenches for Y2K. I watched the dot-com boom rewrite the rules and then implode, leaving hard lessons about what technology alone cannot fix. I helped organizations navigate cost-effective ERPs, rode the shift to the open web, then mobile, then cloud. I championed Agile and DevOps before most believed they needed them and worked through the rise of cybersecurity and the explosion of data and analytics. And now, standing at the frontier of GenAI, I feel the same curiosity I felt in the 90s, typing commands into a Unix terminal and walking away for a break while the code compiled. That confidence it would work, and then the wait while it did, made the result feel like magic. 30 years later, the fire is still there. I pride myself on being a true end-to-end technologist. I have led proposals that secured billions in competitive wins, architected large-scale solutions, personally coded and UX-designed systems, built CTO offices and innovation labs from scratch, envisioned unique solutions that did not exist anywhere in the market, and turned around programs others had written off. Not because I needed to do it all, but because I never hesitated to raise my hand when something needed doing. I have always run toward the things others ran away from. If you have a big idea, an outrageous one, or one people told you was crazy, and it could genuinely move things and make life better for people, let us talk.
Skills
Additional experience
CTO/Partner/EVP - Solutions & Delivery
Ventera
April 2005 – September 2024
Education
- Advanced Management, Stanford University
- Big Data, Massachusetts Institute of Technology