…there is a very small fraction of our revenue that comes from upgrades at this point in time.

We’re down to very low single digits of customers who upgrade, and of those only half of those upgrade 1 or 2 [...]]]> In my recent interview of Autodesk Subscription VP Callan Carpenter, he made these statements:

…there is a very small fraction of our revenue that comes from upgrades at this point in time.

We’re down to very low single digits of customers who upgrade, and of those only half of those upgrade 1 or 2 years back. So we’re talking about approximately 1.5% of our revenue that comes from customers upgrading 1 and 2 versions back.

…[customers who upgrade] 1 or 2 [releases] back, a very small percentage of our customer base, less than 2% of our customer base that was buying those upgrades.

Others are calling those numbers into doubt. Deelip Menezes (SYCODE, Print 3D) estimated the numbers of AutoCAD users not on Subscription at 66% (or 43%, depending on which bit of the post you read), by counting the AutoCAD releases used by his customers and making assumptions about their Subscription status from that. That’s an extremely suspect methodology, as I pointed out:

Your numbers don’t really tell us anything about Subscription v. upgrade proportions. All they tell us is that large numbers of people wait a while before installing a new release. We all knew that, surely.

However, Deelip’s post did prompt me to point out this:

…there is a fair point to be made about people on earlier releases who have hopped off the upgrade train altogether, or at least for a significant number of years. How would they be counted in Callan’s figures? They wouldn’t exist at all, as far as his income percentages are concerned.

Owen Wengerd (ManuSoft, CADLock) asked a random sample of his customers and came up with 82% of them as non-Subscription customers. He also noted that he could come up with a 3% non-Subscription figure if he cooked the books by selectively choosing a convenient time slice. Owen doesn’t state the numbers in his sample, or indicate (or know) how many of the non-Subscribers are also non-upgraders.

I’ve added my own poll (see right) just to add to the mix.

Nothing we can hang a conclusion on yet, then. But Ralph Grabowski (WorldCAD Access, upFront.eZine) uses Autodesk’s own figures to point out that upgrade revenue has increased 18% and Subscription revenue only 7% in the last year. I’m not qualified to perform an analysis of the 2011 Q1 fiscal results, but I can find the figures listed as Maintenance revenue ($195 M) and Upgrade revenue ($51 M). That looks to me like about 21% of the Subscription/upgrade income is coming from upgrades.

Also, according to the published figures, Autodesk has 2,383,000 customers on Subscription. If that represents about 97% of customers, does that really mean Autodesk has only about 2.5 M customers? If I’m looking at these figures in the wrong way, feel free to put me right.

So, what’s the truth? What proportion of Autodesk customers really are on Subscription? 3%? 21%? 43%? 66%? 82%? I’m going to ask Callan a follow-up question about this and will report back on what he has to say. In the spirit of this post, I’ll be asking him for a lot more detail. Watch this space.

I defer to Autodesk Legal on these matters which is where I get my [...]]]> Over on the oft-entertaining Deelip.com, there was an interesting comment made by Autodesk’s Scott Sheppard. After going back and forth a few times over Autodesk’s then-failure to allow Indian customers legal access to certain free Autodesk software downloads, Scott said this:

I defer to Autodesk Legal on these matters which is where I get my guidance. This is not a topic to be debated publicly. As one of our most active Labs participants, I was just sharing some information with you and your readers.

On the face of it, Scott’s “not a topic to be debated publicly” comment seems pretty silly. Ralph Grabowski certainly saw it that way. In these blog-happy days, a lot of things that Autodesk may not like to see discussed are going to be discussed publicly. Autodesk needs to get used to that fact. Attempting to suppress public discussion of Autodesk policies is not just ineffectual, it’s counterproductive and harmful to Autodesk’s image. The very fact that this problem was fixed as a direct result of being discussed publicly shows that such discussion was not only appropriate, it was positively useful to everyone concerned.

That’s on the face of it. Actually, I don’t think the comment is anywhere near as sinister as it seems. I think it was more of a throwaway comment along the lines of, “I can’t continue discussing this because it really isn’t my area”.

Recently, I have noticed Autodesk opening up somewhat and demonstrating increased responsiveness to publicly aired concerns. I know that Scott is quite open to constructively discussing points of disagreement in public comments on his own blog. So I think we should cut him a bit of slack and just put this down as one of those “it may be what I said but it’s not what I meant” moments that we all have from time to time.

IntegrityWare announces tits new Extreme Performance Library

As a traditional magazine journalist (Cadalyst, 1995 – present) and [...]]]> Roopinder Tara has raised an interesting point about how different CAD vendors treat journalists and bloggers. Ralph Grabowski has responded with a “Who cares“. Now you have more CAD blogger navel gazing to put up with as I have my say on the matter.

As a traditional magazine journalist (Cadalyst, 1995 – present) and now as a blogger, I’d like to say I agree with Ralph. The label shouldn’t matter, content should be king. From a reader’s point of view, that is.

Where it does matter is from a vendor’s point of view. How to dish out the freebies? Should Autodesk fly every blogger out to San Francisco, put them all up at Nob Hill hotels and shower them all with gifts? Or just the traditional journalists? Or journalists and major bloggers? If so, what’s a major blog and what isn’t? Is is based on how active the blog is, the quality of writing, the number of visitors, how vendor-friendly the articles are, or some other factor?

Every vendor’s PR team has to draw the line somewhere. Some invite only traditional journalists while others invite a host of bloggers to their events. It all comes down to how much coverage the PR people want to see and how much they are prepared to invest to make that coverage happen. Their budget, their choice.