We may never know. Last year, Autodesk ceo Carl Bass banned seat counts for his company's software packages. The decision is now handicapping the company in the seat counts propaganda war, as they are unable to respond to the astounding numbers being whooped up by SolidWorks...
One Million Seats! - end of January 2011 in April 2009.
One Point Six Million Seats! - end of August 2011
Two Million Seats!
-take a guess when this will occur, teases DS SolidWorks ceo Bertrand Sicot.
Let's take a closer look at what the number consists of. As experienced seat observers know, the number is pretty much always inflated by education seats. In the case of Autodesk, the edu number is somewhat meaningless, for Autodesk gives away Inventor to students and faculty for free.
In the case of DS SolidWorks, however, the edu software is sold, although we have no idea at what price.
At this week's Media Day, DS SolidWorks provided us with some greater details of the seat count numbers, and they look like this:
- 1,589,600 total seats
- 1,127,4oo educational seats
- 462,200 commercial seats
Some more details. SolidWorks sells between 35,000 and 50,000 seats a year, with 24,201 sold in the first half of this year.
For the last five quarters, sales increased by just over 20% each quarter -- following negative growth during the recession.
The average selling price is just over $8,000 and has increased slightly over the last 3.5 years. This is the total of all sales by dealers divided by the number of copies sold -- and not the revenue per seat that DS SolidWorks makes (which would be a number smaller by 20-40%.) It shows that most customers are not buying basic SolidWorks but one of the more expensive, bundled packages. Execs confirmed that the split is roughly 40/40/20 for their high-mid-low priced offerings of SolidWorks, with a slight emphasis for the mid-priced one.
The largest sales are in Europe, but the fastest growing region are developing companies, especially Brazil. The break down is:
- Americas = 37%
- Asia Pacific = 21%
- EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) = 42%
More details in this week's upFront.eZine, due out on Friday.
The seat number doesn't mean a thing because if measuring the popularity of the software. It can be inflated into anything you want. Even commercial licences sold - but not actually used anymore - are seatnumbers!! But that seat is empty
The actual commercial licences in present use - mirrored by the amount of active subscriptions are more accurate i think.
Posted by: Jurgen Galba | Sep 01, 2011 at 07:06 AM
Just a quick clarification--we hit 1 million total licenses in April, 2009. The number reported at SolidWorks World 2011 was just for education licenses, which reached 1 million sold right around Thanksgiving of 2010.
Matt / SolidWorks
Posted by: Matthew West | Sep 01, 2011 at 11:39 AM
SolidWorks did it with hard work and building the best CADCAM reseller network in the world. When SolidWorks started, unlike Siemens, they went directly after Autodesk and they hit hard. The results of not acting like the kind of wimps, who makes excuse after excuse like Siemens US Solid Edge ST marketing have made in the past, speak for themselves. SolidWorks owns the market.
When it comes to technology, SolidWorks is an old package that has lots of disadvantages to it. It's Move Face tool is not really a direct modeling tool and using Move Face in SolidWorks isn't anywhere near as fast or as easy as using a quality direct modeler like SpaceClaim or Creo Direct V18 or even the direct modeling tools in Missler TopSolid CADCAM 7.
When it comes to history based modeling and PDM Missler TopSolid CADCAM 7 blows the doors off SolidWorks with it's built in PDM that's transparent rather than an separate application, it's own 2D and 3D constraint manager rather than licensing D-Cubed 2D and 3D constraint managers from Siemens, an Entity Manager that SolidWorks should have had many years ago and the use of better components like Redway3D for it's graphics engine.
Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA
http://cadcamtechnologyleaders.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Jon Banquer | Sep 01, 2011 at 04:21 PM