Autodesk CEO comes out fighting, but he didn't address the biggest issue.

Just over a month ago, 17 large Architecture practices joined forces by writing an open letter to Andrew Anagnost the President and CEO of Autodesk. The letter raised their concerns relating to the increasing cost of ownership and operation of Autodesk's Revit software and fundamentally its lack of recent software development.

I first learnt of the letter from Martyn Day's coverage in AECMagazine on the 25th July. As you can imagine, this unprecedented open letter lit up LinkedIn, Forums and Facebook Groups globally with much discussion in the AEC media. So much so, in fact, that an additional 68 AEC practices have now added their names to the open letter. For those interested, if you wish to add your name, please visit this site.

The first response from Autodesk came on the 31st July, from Amy Bunszel, SVP of Design & Creation products. Her article attempted to cover many of the issues raised in the open letter, but many questioned why the response had not come directly from Andrew Anagnost, to whom the letter was addressed. Amy acknowledged in her article that Autodesk had somewhat taken their foot off the development pedal for Revit, to concentrate on construction and BIM360. As you will see, her article apologises and asks for a partnership approach in resolving the issues.

Finally, last week Mr Anagnost did provide his response to the open letter, in a blog post on the Autodesk website. Whilst he acknowledged and covered three areas where Autodesk could have improved:-

1. The pace of Revit development has slowed over the last five-plus years.
2. Autodesk has not delivered [on the promise of] a next-generation platform for AEC.
3. Customers have struggled through multiple business/license model changes.

The CEO did, however, push back heavily on the accusations "That Autodesk engages in unempathetic and aggressive business practices". He pinned this to license compliance audits and made no apologies for protecting the company interests. I believe moving forward Autodesk will be more open about the audit process and explain why these can happen at sensitive times within the license renewal lifecycle such as during the license negotiation and discussion stages.

He fought back hard on the cost of licenses, please read his defence in his article here. Autodesk added some visibility by tracking spend profiles over Actual, Perpetual and Subscription scenarios for UK based architecture practices.

Only time will tell if this response is good enough for the 85 companies that have voiced their opinion over Revit. Certainly, Autodesk will divert more software development resource to a next-generation Revit tool. But the real point of the letter was for Autodesk to be more open and transparent with its customer base and I think Andrew Anagnost has got the message loud and clear!

But why is no one talking about license ratios?

Following the announcement that Autodesk was moving to a 'Named-User' license model, many CAD admins, I was in touch with, were horrified by the 2 for 1 Perpetual to Subscription offer. Why, well most of these companies are running at a much higher user ratio than 2 users to 1 license. In fact, some mentioned that one AutoCAD license can often serve over 12 part-time users, such as managers and onsite engineers. With the latest business/license model pivot, Autodesk plans to kill off these ratio's and ensure an income from each of these 12 individual users.

Please see my article here, where I work through an example for a firm with 100 perpetual AutoCAD licenses. Following the transition to Named-User subscription licenses, they will need to pay an additional $61,500 per year to ensure each of their engineers can access AutoCAD.

Autodesk has in the past been very clever at bundling up software programs into bundles, collections or suites. Stating that this was in the interests of the consumer, however, many companies felt it was a way to boost software revenues by forcing software on them that they had little interest or use for.

With the move by Autodesk to a subscription business, they have been at war over the past 5 years over what they see as legacy, low income-generating, perpetual licenses. Most organisations I have spoken with are looking to move their occasional users away from AutoCAD or other Autodesk products to a number of excellent comparative products that do still offer flexible license models with reasonable user ratio provision, such as Bricsys. For customers already on collections or suites, they have already been forced to transition to a lower user ratio, so the impact of moving to Named-User will probably be lower than many other customers still running perpetual licenses.

I hope in the 'behind closed doors' discussions that are undoubtedly happening with the 85 companies on the list, that customers are highlighting the issues and escalating costs that they will face through the loss of larger license ratio's. The management of these web-based 'named-user' licenses is another issue, with many concerned that considerably more hours will be required to activate, deactivate and monitor license use, but that is for another article.

Conclusion

It is incredibly unusual for an open letter such as this to reach the point where it is published. It has highlighted a problem with the Autodesk account management team, where customers feel that they are no longer being listened to and therefore have no other option than to publish a public complaint. As a result, Autodesk will certainly review their account communication strategies and look at how to be more open and accountable. However, the issue of perpetual vs subscription licenses with the associated additional costs will, in my opinion, continue to rumble on. Most companies are only now beginning to calculate the true cost of moving from Perpetual to the new 'Named-User' subscription model. This story has will undoubtedly have many more twists and turns yet. What do you think of the forceful move by Autodesk to transition all customers to subscription licenses? Is this good business or are they being deaf to their customer's needs and complaints?

Paul Empringham has over 25 years in the CAD industry and firmly believes that all companies running Engineering Software need a world-class license asset management and monitoring solution, so they can negotiate savings with their Software Vendors based on data-driven insights.