OIT Software Licensing is evaluating the current and prospective usage of Wolfram Alpha Pro.
Wolfram|Alpha Pro gives you a whole new way to interact with Wolfram|Alpha—and immediate access to new, more personal, computational knowledge.
A site license for Wolfram Alpha Pro has been requested through our new software evaluation request form (http://oit.duke.edu/comp-print/software/request/it_request.php) for central funding/distribution, and we put together a wiki with some information on the software and some of the purchase options.
If your department currently uses this software or if you are interested in using this software or have considered purchasing this before, we invite you to visit the wiki and comment on it. The information that we collect in this manner will help us determine whether or not central funding and distribution would be beneficial to the Duke community.
Wiki: https://wiki.duke.edu/display/OITSLP/Wolfram+Alpha+Pro
Summary of wiki:
Wolfram Alpha Pro is a service that costs $4.99 per user per month ($2.99/month for students). The site license is a cost-saving purchase if there are 136 active users of Alpha Pro at Duke at any given time. If all Mathematica users at Duke purchased a subscription for Pro for a year, it would cost about $177,000, but it is not the case that all Mathematica users are buying Alpha Pro. We don’t have any metrics for Alpha Pro purchasing at Duke, actually, since it’s something that people buy individually as needed on their personal computers or phones. Information on demand and usage gathered on this wiki will help determine whether or not a site license makes sense or if it is better to just have individuals buy it as they want.
