What Makes You So Special?: With Over 1 Million People in the World Able to Do Your Job, Altium Acts to Help More

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, Apr 20 (MARKET WIRE) --
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 do 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 from 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 license

-- US$3,995 per perpetual user licence which includes software assurance
for the first 12 months, renewable annually thereafter for US$1,500 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.

About Altium

Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) provides next-generation electronics design
solutions that break down the barriers to innovation. Altium's solutions
are unique because they unify the separate processes of electronics
design. This holistic approach lets electronics designers consider the
need of the end user ahead of any design decision, and then harness the
latest devices and technologies, manage their projects across broad
design 'ecosystems,' and create connected, intelligent designs, all in a
single application.

Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney, sales offices in the
United States, Europe, China, and resellers in all other major markets.
For more information, visit www.altium.com.

Altium, Altium Designer and LiveDesign, and their respective logos, are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited, or its
subsidiaries. All other registered or unregistered trademarks mentioned
in this release are the property of their respective owners, and no
trademark rights to the same are claimed.

US Media Contact for Altium:
Janice Mackey
Weber Shandwick Worldwide
150 Mathilda Place, Suite 302
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
United States
www.webershandwick.com
Telephone: 408-685-0609
Email: Email Contact

Corporate Media Contact:
Alan Smith
Altium Limited
3 Minna Close
Belrose NSW 2085
Australia
www.altium.com
Telephone: +61 2 8622 8100
Fax: +61 2 8622 8140
Email: Email Contact

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