Planit Test Management Solutions (Planit), Australia’s leading specialist in Software Quality Assurance and Testing solutions has today announced a radical change to the licensing and pricing structure for the T-Plan suite of software testing products. Organizations now have the option to acquire T-Plan licenses on an annual subscription basis, providing a greater flexibility and enormous cost saving compared to traditional software package acquisitions.

Chris Carter, Managing Director of Planit, attended the recent T-Plan User Conference at Cornwall, United Kingdom, where the new pricing structure was discussed with the T-Plan Ltd Board. Chris observed: “For years the cost of software testing tools has been prohibitively expensive, often beyond the budget of many organizations and return on investment has proved difficult to justify. The new subscription based acquisition model for T-Plan now offers a cost effective solution which will contribute significantly towards quality deliverables whilst keeping expenditure at an affordable & appropriate level.”

Generally software acquisitions are treated as capital expenditure for budgeting purposes and fixed assets subject to annual depreciation charges for accounting. If the software is purchased this has an immediate impact on the acquirer’s cash flow and if leased or otherwise financed creates a balance sheet liability to match the purchase price. In either case this represents capital expenditure which is usually an early casualty of any squeeze on expenditure and or cash flow. It also tends to be subject to more scrutiny than revenue expenditure as it represents a single large outlay or commitment rather than merely part of the ongoing and essential cost of operations.

Under the new T-Plan approach of an annual rental these issues are overcome. There is clearly identifiable and controllable cost. The headline expense is considerably lower than outright purchase and the degree of commitment can be great or little (albeit with some cost implication) as the customer requires. Commitments of more than one year may still require disclosure in the annual financial statements but they are clearly operating leases and should not excite the same issues as capital expenditure/finance leases. They are not really any different to 2 or 3 year deals for utilities, maintenance or supplies that have a minimum take up limit specified. They enable the user to fix prices for the period at a lower rate than one year arrangement thus obtaining both a discount and security against future price increases.

In short T-Plan avoids freeze on capital expenditure, limits financial commitment, allows flexibility at the acquirer’s discretion and reduces finance department’s scope for objection.

Planit’s integrated solutions combine software testing best practices, market leading tools, a wide range of professional services, training and certification to provide: fully managed testing, web/e-commerce testing, strategic outsourcing and development partnering.

Planit proudly offer Software Quality and Testing solutions and training to Australia’s top 1000 organisations.

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