capabilities & expertise
Our specialization means that we are one of the few software teams in the country that is dedicated exclusively to creating high-end custom software solutions for higher education. We understand academia’s technology, policies, standards, and ethos in a way that few software development companies can.
We help IT groups and research groups with custom software development, devops, custom integrations, data visualization, and security.
The size and diversity of our team allows our clients to draw on a variety of design, programming, management, and strategy talent for their projects. We were early adopters and advocates of many of the industry’s best tools and practices. We strive to help your team to adopt these practices as well.
"West Arete has been extremely enjoyable to work with because they are concerned not only with the product in development, but also with the transfer of ownership and knowledge to our team in regard to what has been developed."
We produce long-lived production web and mobile apps, often starting from little more than a concept. We know how to integrate with your university’s authentication system. And we’re adept at integrating seamlessly with other data sources and services.
Explore web and mobile app capabilitiesWhen you make West Arete part of your research group’s technical team, it allows everyone else to focus on the science. We’ll work with you during the grant-writing process to set reasonable objectives, budgets, and technical strategies. Once the project begins, we’ll work with your team for the duration to handle the software development, data management, and security.
Explore research support capabilitiesUniversity computing environments often struggle to balance infrastructure automation with the need for special cases. We help IT teams to overcome design and implementation obstacles, to achieve smooth integration between infrastructure as code, configuration management, and true continuous integration
Explore DevOps capabilitiesOnce a web application complete, its real lifetime can begin. Any application that is in active production use will have needs surrounding hosting, modernization, security, feature requests, monitoring, and support. West Arete provides comprehensive fixed-fee service contracts so that your application can remain vibrant, stable, and secure, without any load on your own team.
Explore service contract capabilitiesCounter-intuitively, critical production applications can often fall into disrepair. Teams get busy, budgets get reprioritized, and the less flashy applications can atrophy as a result, compromising performance, accessibility, security, and the ability to add new capabilities. We can gradually modernize your production applications over time, with zero downtime.
Explore modernization capabilitiesSometimes your team simply has too many projects on their plate. Delegate to us the projects that always seem to get deprioritized, and let your staff focus on the projects that represent their best and highest use.
Explore team augmentation capabilitiesAll good technologists are hungry to improve. Your team wants to succeed with Scrum and story writing, with test-driven development, with continuous integration, and with infrastructure automation. We have a long history of mentorship at West Arete, and we are adept at working side-by-side with teams to help them gain traction and deeply understand these techniques.
Explore mentoring capabilitiesThe first step is often a zero-pressure phone call to answer questions and explore whether we both feel that there could be a fit.