The Alchemist (Networks) Ltd. is a very small company set up with the inetention of making networked computer systems work for their owners rather than the other way around.

The Alchemist does not sell equipment, or bandwidth or maintenence. We sell only help. We would like to sell you enough help for you to get control of your systems, and offer you someone to fall back on when you have problems, or when you need some help with new systems. We will be happy to set up network management systems, to help automate the job of monitoring your network, but we do not sell them. We can provide help interpreting data from network management, and setting thresholds, and values that will allow your systems to warn you before you have problems.

Too often it seems systems are bought to save time and money, and make a company more efficient, but somewhere along the way, things get out of control, and the computer system starts dictating how the company will operate, and starts demanding more and more money, and ends up stifling rather than enabling the primary business. Computer systems, and their networks can run wildly out of control, with ever escalating costs. What started as a simple requirement for some data sharing, becomes some huge department consuming resources in a way never anticipated.

At the Alchemist (Networks) Ltd. we have the capability to look at your network, and tell you what it is doing, where it may be going wrong, what if anything needs upgrading, and often more importantly what is dragging it down. Often this is a badly written application, but Identifying what is going wrong, and how, takes you halfway to putting it right. Sometimes the simplest of faults on a network infrastructure can give endless performance problems, that tend to be lived with, just because nobody knows how to identify and fix them.

On bigger networks, often those running the network dont know what their heaviest users are, and often dont know where all their traffic is going to, or why. Analysis of traffic can provide a valuable insight into network performance, and where and why you are spending so much money, and indeed whether you need to be spending so much.

Often networks can be simplified, and tuned to a particular type of use, without investing huge sums of money. Carefull consideration of traffic flows, can allow you to build a high performance network out of the most inexpensive components, that are often just disregarded by those that have equipment to sell.

where you dont know what is happening you are vulnerable. We endeavour to explain and clarify what is going on, or what needs to go on, on your network, so that you have the information you need to make informed decisions, and allow you to get on with running your business.