New SOLIDWORKS Subscription Late Policy

[Adrian_Diverso]

Are we sure at this point DS doesn’t stand for Death Star?

[joshmings]

This is from @ml13ml on the SolidWorks forum post:

Have been waiting for my phone call from my VAR since I heard about this!

We get the full triple whammy! Not only are our subscription costs around $500 more expensive than the USA (just because we are in Australia) BUT I was informed that our costs are going to rise because of the exchange rate!

I’m waiting for the quote to come in but I’m guessing $2300 per Professional License! For a small company with two licenses that’s going to hurt to miss a year!

UPDATE:
Just received quote $2739AUD - $1997US per License …ouch

UPDATE:
If nothing else it has given Marketing opportunity to others. This in my inbox this morning!

"Michael - not sure exactly what sort of crack Dassault is smoking, but I am willing to work with you to see if Onshape could replace one (if not both) of your SolidWorks licenses.

Some things to think about;

You have already paid full purchase price for SolidWorks - its yours. Not being on their subscription does not stop you using it. What will you not be able to do? Well, exchange files with the few people that will stay current after this debacle. Onshape reads and writes SolidWorks 2015 files (bodies only).

You can still use SolidWorks for the short list of things that you need but Onshape doesn’t do yet.

AND by using Onshape, you get all the things that SolidWorks doesn’t do;

Built in CATIA (and other) file translator
Collboration and sharing built in
Design Reviews (follow mode)
Supplier management - secure sharing and un sharing and the ability to write out whatever file they need.

If for no other reason than to have a vent - lets have a quick chat to see what we can do for you. I will make myself available at your convenience"

[ml13ml]

Josh you are too quick! I was just heading over here to post that!

Love the opening … not sure exactly what sort of crack Dassault is smoking. You just don’t see enough of that in Marketing!

[joshmings]

Yeah, I laughed at that one

[adam]

This is getting good.

[bruce]

http://imgur.com/DR70aCO

[JeffMirisola]

The TPM and ModernTech posts have both been pulled - 404’d, if you will. Seems odd.

[joshmings]

From the Dassault Systemes 2015 Q2 Earnings Call:

Jay Vleeschhouwer
Okay. Next, for Thibault, it’s our understanding that, starting next January of 2016, you are going to be changing the pricing for customers who have gone off of maintenance or subscription and wish to resume or reinstate the subscription and, in effect, making them – making it less desirable for them to go off maintenance and making it more expensive for them to come back onto maintenance after some period of time. Could you verify that that is in fact something that you mean to do? And given your normal churn rate of customers go on and off maintenance, what do you think the incremental revenue opportunity might be from putting in that kind of new subscription reinstatement for pricing?

Thibault de Tersant [Dassault Systemes, Senior EVP, Chief Financial Officer]
Thank you, Jay. Well, in fact the policy we have for reinstatement across all our process and rules portfolio has been the same for the past well, I prefer not to say but probably 20 years, which is essentially that when you stop paying for maintenance and you want to go back and pay again, and be under maintenance again you need to catch up for the period of time in which you have not renewed maintenance and the reason for that is because we have continued to do R&D and the improvement in functionalities and they are brought when you get back under maintenance, so we need to be fair with all our customers.

And there wasn’t one exception actually to this rule. And the one exception was that we had a fixed amount for SOLIDWORKS users when they were returning under maintenance. And frankly, we don’t believe I mean this rule was the one which was at the beginning of SOLIDWORKS. And we really don’t see a reason why, we would do things differently for SOLIDWORKS than for all of our brands, because we have the exact same rationale. And of course, the more we go, the more the SOLIDWORKS product portfolio will be based upon this 3DEXPERIENCE platform and we’ll share applications, so very important to be a consistent across of users. So that is the rationale.

Now, to be honest with you, I have not measured in terms of dollar revenue, incremental dollar revenue what is going to be brought by this changing of rules. I expect maybe a small improvement in renewal rates. That would be my expectation. But it is not planned exactly yet.

[JeffMirisola]

Stealing this. Hope you don’t mind.Proper credit will be given.

Have to say that while I can see their reasoning, to some extent, I don’t think Dassault is seeing the whole picture. How many 1-, 2-, 5-seat companies are there that have CATIA or SIMULIA or some other high-end package? While their subscription policy may work for those companies that have high-end products, and can always afford the fees, there are plenty of small SolidWorks shops who may not be able to. Any sort of minor downturn can be major for small players.

[Anna_Wood]

Dassault has no interest in the small accounts, never has had interest…

I will NEVER renew my personal license for SolidWorks. The arrogance of Dassault is over the top and I will not support them.

This just confirms my reasons for not blogging about SolidWorks anymore. They (Dassault) are no longer a company I can support with my time and energies.

A very good time for all of SolidWorks competitors to flip their accounts. My CAD dollars will be going to Onshape.

[idesignhaus]

With “rewards” like this, who needs punishment?

I’ve watched Onshape since last summer. But I would still need quite a few sets of features before I’d be able to jump the sinking Dassault ship. The continued mistreatment of customers by Dassault will nonetheless contribute to the sinking of the ship—particularly when done during the a new downward leg of the recession/depression. That’s not the smartest time to put the vice on customers, even if in the valiant name of lowering customer service standards of SolidWorks for the sake of being “consistent” with the rest of the Dassault offerings.

[idesignhaus]

Though I cannot access the SW forum right now (server throws errors when I attempt to log in or view the related subscription thread), I am subscribed to the thread. So I received notification of an update by email that Rachel York replied with this:

All SOLIDWORKS Value Added Partners have been notified of a new late Subscription policy and have begun reaching out to individual customers. Effective January 1, 2016, licenses with expired subscription will be required to pay the subscription cost for the period of time the license was not under Subscription. This change effects all DS SOLIDWORKS products and is consistent with industry norms as well all Dassault Systemes products. For specific details regarding your license, please contact your SOLIDWORKS Value Added Partner.

Though it’s NOT the norm of SolidWorks to charge for unnecessary/unused subscription services, after 20 years of business—it now WILL be. Is that the norm of Onshape? Other competition?

[Adrian_Diverso]

I had to…

[gilson_design]

This is basically going to affect the 5%'ers of SolidWorks user base, but how many of these 5%'ers run or are involved with a SolidWorks User Group? The foot soldiers that put their time and effort in without reward or benefit are likely running their own small business or part of a small business… This change is going to affect the community as well…

[Rick_M]

I am kind of glad to hear you could not get onto the SW Forum this afternoon, because that means that it’s not just me.
I am the person who authored the discussion a few days ago about the new late policy on the SolidWorks Forum. I expected a lot of views but I also thought a lot more people would have already heard about this from their VAR’s or other sources. I found not many had heard about it and then today’s posts about the policy information being pulled (or 404’d) from the VAR sites became much more dramatic.
Then this early afternoon I logged off and after that I could not log back in - always got an error …#97…
I also could not see the discussion anymore. I thought maybe DSS had pulled my discussion and banned me from the forum and My.solidworks.com completely. Then I saw a few new emails of new posts to that site so I figured that the discussion is still there, I just can’t see it because I can’t log in.
Now I am at home and tried again (12 hours later) and still get the error.
I am hoping that the problem is there login function has a problem and anyone that logs off can’t get back in. I hope that’s it - if not,???
I just signed into this site tonight - didn’t know about it until one of the posts from this discussion on this site was copied and posted on the one I started on the SW forum.
Rick.

[Rick_M]

When I tried to look on the forum a little while ago, almost all the posts that I could see (on the entire forum) without logging in were about 8 to 11 hours old. Maybe that means that the site is not letting ANYONE login. You would think though that SOMEONE at SW would have noticed the sudden decrease in activity and checked it out, if that is in fact the condition.
It will be interesting to see if we can get in tomorrow or if SW figures out something is not working and posts a message that the login feature is down.
That is if this isn’t just us that posted on that “SolidWorks will be switching to a “full backdating” format 1/1/16” discussion.

Maybe, someone who hasn’t been to that discussion could try to log into the SW discussion forum and see if they can get in. Then at least we would know if it was everyone of just us that had been there and posted on that discussion!

[JeffMirisola]

I couldn’t login last night either, but all is well now including your post.

[ScottWertel]

Jeff (@idesignhaus),

I’d like to say that it is the norm, but cloud-based CAD has broken the norm. I can say that Solid Edge is very much that way, and Siemens treats all their products with a very painful “back-tax” for anyone who stops paying maintenance or cancels licenses.

I run 27 floating licenses of Solid Edge. The downturn has been tough and we look for every area to save money. To date, I’ve always looked at canceling licenses, but never have. Why? Because it takes 3 years to save enough by canceling the license to be able to pay for the cost of reissuing the license if we happen to need more. Because the economic cycle typically doesn’t last that long, I’ve never been able to justify a ROI by canceling licenses. Instead, I keep paying for nothing. That includes the fact that we haven’t upgraded Solid Edge for 2 versions. We’ll finally upgrade this year, 3 versions (and 3 years) later!

I run over 150 Teamcenter licenses and I can’t even tell you the number of “extra” solutions I pay for because I need to pay for an entire bundle just to get to the one bit of functionality my company needs. I’m constantly transferring licenses for Teamcenter in order to stay legal and current, but I never actually cancel any except for the few mistakes that were made in the past buying something we didn’t need and won’t ever use. (Blamed again on the confusing and obfuscated way Siemens licenses Teamcenter features.)

[joshmings]

I would say this helps the VAR. Subscription Service subsidizes the reseller. There will be a big push through the end of the year to get companies current. That’s money in the bucket. For those that don’t re-up, or fall by the wayside, that’s revenue pushed into next year.

[JeffMirisola]

Resellers get 40% of renewal fees, and I’m not so sure that this new policy is going to get a vast majority of the 5% to re-up, especially where many of them do the every-other year or so thing to keep their costs down. Perhaps they get current this year, assuming they budgeted for it, but then what happens in future years? For some, especially those that have a side business, the annual cost may not be feasible. I think you’ll see a portion of them move to Onshape or Fusion as the per month payment is easier to swallow.