Data Analysis & Simulation

Archive for March, 2008


Student and Academic Licenses for EasyFit

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

The Student License is a new, affordable license that can be purchased and used by students of educational institutions for homework, coursework, and other non-commercial purposes. This license expires in 12 months, starting from the purchase date.

On the other hand, if you need to use EasyFit for more than one year – for example, for PhD research, then the Academic License would be a more cost-effective solution for you, since it doesn’t expire and can be used for as long as necessary. We have been offering the Academic License for almost 2 years now, and during that time, we have received a lot of useful feedback from our customers. We appreciate any kind of feedback, both positive and negative, so if you have something to say about EasyFit, or would like to share how you are using it exactly, feel free to let us know.

EasyFit Subscription Licensing

Monday, March 24th, 2008

We are happy to announce that EasyFit is now available on a subscription basis, in addition to the traditional perpetual software licensing. The subscription licensing program enables you to legally use the full version of EasyFit for a limited period of time without the need for a large upfront investment. At the same time, you get access to the latest versions of the product and technical support.

Specifically, the Annual Subscription License allows you to use EasyFit for one year at a fraction of the Perpetual License price. We are also considering to offer additional shorter-term subscriptions such as semi-annual and quarterly licenses – please let us know if you are interested.

Why Subscription Software?
Outside the software world, the idea of charging customers per use or per time period is nothing new – consider your electricity or phone bills – because companies and individual users usually get paid monthly, they also prefer to spend monthly. Software vendors don’t want to get left behind and strive to offer “pay per use” and similar flexible pricing models. This approach has in fact been mastered by numerous online subscription sites that usually charge you per month.

The situation with desktop software is a bit different here: the customers are prepared to pay a relatively large upfront fee and optional annual maintenance fees due to historical reasons. After all, software users actually like to own the products they purchased. However, when it comes to large ticket items, there is a benefit in renting, or subscribing to, software products, which allows you to better manage your costs and save money in certain cases – for example, when you need the software for a short-term project.

There is also a positive side effect of subscription software: for a customer, it drives down the costs of switching to competing products, and thus motivates vendors to work harder on improving their software. Some large companies such as Autodesk already offer their rather expensive products on a yearly subscription basis as a cost-effective alternative to the perpetual licensing, and this is something other vendors should consider doing.

Extreme Value Distributions

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

The problem of modeling extreme or rare events arises in many areas where such events can have very negative consequences. Some examples of rare events include extreme floods and snowfalls, high wind speeds, extreme temperatures, large fluctuations in exchange rates, and market crashes. To develop appropriate probabilistic models and assess the risks caused by these events, business analysts and engineers frequently use the extreme value distributions (EVD). read the full article

EasyFit: select the best fitting distribution and use it to make better decisions. learn more
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