Here's why Autodesk makes the first three licenses of PLM 360 free

Autodesk has an unusual pricing scheme for its PLM 360 product lifecycle management system: the first three professional users at a site get to access the cloud-based system free, and then each additional one pays $900 a year.

Software researcher Jay Vleeschhouwer of Griffin Securities may have figured out why precisely the first three are free:

Autodesk’s main competitor in the mechanical CAD market, Dassault’s SolidWorks, has an average of three licenses per customer and, as [DS] management itself has noted, the majority of SolidWorks’ customers do not yet have a [PLM] data management system...

Now, why would an office with three SolidWorks users want PLM from Autodesk? Beats me. OTOH, Mr Vleeschhouwer notes that there are 8x as many PTC Windchill PLM licenses as Creo Pro [Pro/Engineer] ones, although he is not sure if this means that there are lots of non-CAD users or lots non-Pro/E CAD users using Windchill.

300,000 or 1.6 million?

In his report, Mr Vleeschhouwer estimates that SolidWorks has 300,000 active [commercial] licenses at the end of 2011, a number vastly smaller than the 1.8 million [commercial + educational] licenses touted last week in front of invited media, but still ahead of Inventor's estimated 210,000 active users.

 

Comments

[Bill Fane]

It would be interesting to know how many actual, active commercial users there are for any particular program as opposed to how many commercial + educational serial numbers have been sold since the beginning of time. I was at the SolidWorks media event and got the impression that 1.6 million was the latter case.
How about if software contained a litte bit of code that say once every 3 months logged into an "active user" site and said "Hi!" It could be done totally anonymously through a blind token rather than the actual serial number. This would give a true count of actual users.

[Ralph Grabowski]

The checking of active licenses occurs to a limited extent already. For instance, DraftSight from Dassault Systemes requires you to re-register every year.

I suspect Autodesk could give us real numbers, because its AutoCAD software phones home every time we start it up. Perhaps Autodesk stopped handing out seat counts when they realized that the real number was embarrassingly smaller of the all-time-serial-numbers-ever-issued number.

Hence Mr Vleeschhouwer's estimate of just 300,000 active commercial licenses (at the end of 2011) versus the 1.8-million number Dassault Systemes trumpets (albeit as of mid-2012).