We built our business on
developing specific solutions.
Alchemy Systems was created from the merger of
two Austin technology companies, Avatar Technology &
Alchemy Studios, each with a 10-year history of developing
custom applications for clients.
Educational Testing Service
In 2005, Alchemy partnered with Educational Testing Service to win the teacher testing and certification contract for the State of Texas. This five-year contract with the Department of Education for the State of Texas required Alchemy to develop an integrated system that allows prospective teachers from around the state to register and pay for the numerous certification tests required to teach in Texas. Alchemy was able to customize its Avatar learning platform to create the integrated registration, score reporting, and customer support system for the project. This system allows prospective teachers, call center support staff, and TEA supervisors to access information in real-time. As part of the project, Alchemy interfaced its platform with a number of different data systems to provide seamless data transfer between ETS and the State of Texas. The project was developed and launched with service in less than eight months.
We Are Teachers
In 2006, Alchemy partnered with WeAreTeachers.com to leverage its Avatar learning management platform into a custom application that is now a key component of the WeAreTeachers website. The Alchemy technology team developed the WeAreTeacher platform using Liferay, an open source software platform, as the base for the social networking aspects of the application. Alchemy integrated the Avatar LMS platform into this application as well as multiple social media applications including Facebook and Twitter. The WeAreTeacher application was developed in less than a year and at substantial savings due to the utilization of existing technology and expertise.
Reliable methodology & technology.
Alchemy has a long successful history of building large data systems such as ETS / TEA and WeAreTeachers. Experienced project managers lead teams of engineers and developers to carry out the design and development of these projects utilizing the Project Management Institute's (PMI) internationally recognized methodology. In addition to design / development, the Alchemy IT team builds and maintains the hosting environments for these solutions which is often a state of the art, dedicated web farm co-located at a Tier 1 data center. The Alchemy web farm’s structural design and supporting tools have been developed and perfected over a number of years of providing web hosting services. The web farms have redundancy built in throughout the network, making them highly available, and they’re monitored by Alchemy personnel 24 hours a day, year round. IT team members begin working a problem within minutes of automatic notification by surveillance tools. These large software solutions and hosting infrastructure are often constructed to support hundreds of thousands of visitors per day.
Future opportunities.
Alchemy continues to focus on its own technology platforms for training and education. However, we still work to leverage our considerable technology development expertise in new partnerships or opportunities. Specifically, we seek ways to employ existing technology into long-term growth opportunities that will enhance our skills and technology.