Altium

About Altium

Altium is a leading technology company specializing in PCB (Printed Circuit Board) design software and solutions. With a dedicated education team, Altium helps students learn PCB design skills and provides educators with resources to enhance their curriculum. Altium aims to spread knowledge and make a positive impact on students’ lives by empowering them with industry-relevant skills.

Through the Altium Education Program students get free access to Altium software, college and university level courses, and course certificates. The program provides Altium Designer Professional subscriptions to students for free, which is an industry standard in PCB design and is used in the development of basic boards to complex multi-board systems.

For educators the program offers a suite of courses that can either be used to supplement existing curriculum or full courses that can be used to provide students with a full overview of PCB design.

Challenge

Altium faced challenges in efficiently verifying students’ academic credentials to grant them access to educational resources and software. The verification process required the team to manage a database of email domains and manually validate student documentation, leading to time-consuming tasks.

“When you start getting an influx of verification requests from universities around the globe, it’s hard to standardize a process which leads to a lot of manual work.” – Mitch Ridgeway, Content Developer and Trainer

As the company’s academic program grew, the manual verification process became increasingly complex and difficult to scale. Additionally, the diversity of academic systems worldwide posed challenges in standardizing verification procedures for all regions.

Solution

To streamline the academic verification process and alleviate the burden on their team, Altium sought a verification service. After evaluating various options, Altium chose Proxi.id for its comprehensive verification capabilities, competitive pricing, and the ability to easily integrate the service with existing systems. The seamless integration of Proxi.id into Altium’s tech stack facilitated a smooth onboarding process, minimizing implementation challenges.

“The Proxi.id solution stood out compared to other services for how easy it was to integrate with our marketing tech stack.”

The Proxi.id solution offered multiple verification methods, including Single Sign-On (SSO) and alternative options for schools without SSO capabilities or non-standard domains. Altium appreciated Proxi.id’s privacy-focused approach, ensuring the security of student data while simplifying the verification process.

“The fact that user data is deleted weekly gave us the peace of mind of knowing that we are working with a verification partner that takes end-user privacy seriously.”

Results

Implementing Proxi.id improved the efficiency and scalability of Altium’s academic program. The automated verification process eliminated the workload of manually verifying academic users, enabling the reallocation of resources to more strategic tasks.

“One of the biggest impacts in using the Proxi.id service has been being able to reassign resources to work more closely with students and educators.”

Altium has expanded its outreach to students and educators worldwide, enhancing accessibility to PCB design education. Altium experienced a notable increase in student enrollment, with over 250 students registering daily.

“We are now able to focus on growing in different countries, and Proxi.id has enabled us to do this much more easily.”

The reduced lead times and simplified verification process has contributed to a smoother enrollment process, mitigating the risk of student dropouts. Altium has been able to pursue growth opportunities while maintaining data privacy and security standards.

“We can credit Proxi.id with reducing the risk of students dropping through the funnel.”

Conclusion

By partnering with Proxi.id, Altium successfully addressed the challenges associated with academic verification, achieving significant improvements in efficiency, scalability, and student enrollment.

“Proxi.id has covered all the bases and addressed all scenarios to take work off our plate which is awesome.”