How CASE sees custom as evergreen in software development
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By
Ross Wilkers
Some level of refactoring and engineering will always be needed to make commercial software work for agencies. Here is how this AE Industrial-backed company is looking at opportunities there.
In putting together CASE, CEO Paul Farmer and other key members of the executive team sought to build a company that specializes in full-stack custom software development among other areas.
That may seem contrary on the surface because today’s government technology landscape is replete with a theme best described as “Go commercial, and fast” for software acquisition.
But with security requirements always being a theme, Farmer sees a world that will always require some type of specialized work to make the tools work for agencies.
“The COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) solution you’re bringing in that you think is going to be fine when you get it in there, then it doesn’t run in this cloud and all these services aren’t available because of classification levels, that means you’re still going to have to do some engineering there,” Farmer told WT.
CASE is owned by the private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which started to build the company in 2021 when it acquired FireTeam Solutions as the foundational piece of the strategy.
FireTeam then combined with the former Case Consulting in 2022 and Farmer, who was CEO for the latter company, took on the role for the larger company. CASE has since gone onto make two acquisitions, including the purchase of CyberKinetics in 2024 and then Ragnarok during the summer of this year.
The CyberKinetics transaction naturally brought a focus on both offensive and defense cybersecurity to CASE, Farmer said.
Ragnarok has been involved in different aspects of enterprise technology including FinTech, the shorthand term for financial technology.
In any conversation about government and technology, the theme of artificial intelligence and keeping up with the advancement of this suite of tech has to come up.
One use case often mentioned by companies and agencies in AI centers around using the tools to aid in software code research and writing. Farmer said CASE’s engineers and developers are also doing so as they seek to stay current and competitive.
“They have to be able to augment that and show they can even be more efficient now because for these manual scripts, they can get the framework and then tweak it where needed,” Farmer said. “Then they can jump to the more complicated things where you need to have a human.”
As Farmer sees things, this is one example of how industry can be more efficient in how it operates as the government also continues to push for that same idea. Farmer said the idea should be to identify the kind of tasks humans should have more time to work on versus the mundane.
“No one wants to do the more tedious stuff that a machine could do, so let's have the machines do the things that they do best and augment the staff with what they need to get their jobs done,” Farmer said. “Nothing makes a developer feel better than seeing a user save 5 minutes or 5 hours, that's just such a rewarding thing to see your customer go through in helping them with their job.”