What makes you so special?

Altium is serving notice that the old way of approaching electronics design needs to change for good.

And the company is backing this with dramatic changes to how it prices its solutions, changes which remove a key barrier to designers and their organizations being able to design the new wave of intelligent, connected electronic products.

“Electronics designers and their organizations must answer one question: what makes me so special? This is the crucial question for everyone seeking to more than just survive this recession,” said Emma Lo Russo, President of Altium.

“What we’re announcing today is a way forward for all those electronics designers seeking to harness the greater opportunities in this increasingly global environment.

“By permanently reducing the price of our solutions, Altium is removing a key barrier that stops electronics designers accessing everything they need to take their design concepts to market, ahead of the new competitors that continue to emerge. We’re helping them plug into a continuous stream of new devices, technologies and developments that keep them at the forefront of their industry. We believe taking this holistic approach to electronics design, with the user’s experience firmly at the center of the design process, is the breakthrough organizations need.

It’s this holistic approach that will let electronics designers differentiate themselves from their competitors. It allows designers the freedom to discover and explore how and which new features and functionality are added to their end product, as well as designing-in a continuing, connected relationship with their end users, all from within a single design environment.

Altium is opening up this holistic approach to any designer in the world, with a dramatic, low-cost entry to Altium's electronics design solution. Altium Designer is now available at a single, global subscription price of US$195 per month, purchased in 12-month blocks.

Altium Designer's perpetual license price has also been permanently reduced to a single, global price of US$3,995.

Both license options include 12 months’ software assurance which delivers two major product releases per year, along with continuous updates.

“The current recession is bad at the obvious level,” says Emma Lo Russo, “but it’s worse on another: it’s camouflaging what’s already happening. Electronics design is changing. Where it is done is changing. Those who do electronics design are changing. What users demand of electronic products is changing. And if electronics designers, and their organizations, don’t change now, they are at risk of not surviving the greater impact of globalization once we’re through the recession.

“In fact, the rule book of how electronics design is done, that has served designers well over the past 40 years, is now increasingly inadequate in the face of globalization.

“These old rules increasingly struggle to cope with the new programmable devices, wireless technologies and increasing processing power. The risk to designers is that the old way of doing electronics design will deny them the new opportunities afforded by the convergence of these new technologies.

“The old rules require a divide-and-conquer approach: divide the process into smaller chunks, and conquer the complexity. The problem is that this approach, of reducing the intent and broader view of the design to a set of smaller, granulated problems, kills innovation at the higher level.

“The artificial constraints imposed by having to choose a device or functionality much too early in the design process is bad for design and bad for innovation.

“Our announcements today are all about providing more for less for more: more functionality and access to new devices and technologies than ever before, for less than US$10 a day, making it affordable and easy for more designers around the globe to tap into the opportunity to pioneer the new wave of connected, intelligent, next-generation electronic products.”

Pricing and availability
Altium’s new pricing is available now, in the following options:

• US$195 per month purchased as a 12 month contract, totaling US $2,340 per annum per user licence
• US$3,995 per perpetual user licence which includes software assurance for the first 12 months, renewable annually thereafter for US$1500 per user license

Altium has also dramatically reduced the price of its desktop NanoBoard NB2, its reconfigurable development platform. The desktop NanoBoard NB2 makes it easy to explore complex design and device trade-offs, move functionality between hardware and software at will, and rapidly develop systems within a graphical drag-and-drop, plug-and-play environment. It now costs US$1,995. Find out more at www.altium.com.