The Business Advantage Group announced the results of its Worldwide CAD Trends 2015 Survey of 635 CAD users and decision makers from across a range of company sizes and industries.
It found that Cloud based CAD has 'high awareness' among CAD users, managers and executives and offers new business and delivery models for CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM/PLM software companies. It is not yet obvious whether this trend will best serve users or software companies wanting to switch users to subscription based revenue models, but the CAD Trends survey offers some clues.
Top perceived benefits are 'higher mobility' (66%) followed by 'ease of updating software' (45%), 'cost reductions' (39%) and 'increased storage capability' (31%).
However, Cloud based CAD remains low in perceived importance, which may indicate that sufficient ROI isn't yet obvious to all users. At the present time, it appears to be more important to AEC - rather than manufacturing - users, where there is greater need for mobility within the sector.
The report concludes that, despite the anticipated rise in usage, simply delivering the existing CAD functionality via the cloud rather than locally installed CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM/PLM solutions does not appear to be appealing enough. And that Cloud based CAD solutions need to add 'must-have' benefits, functionality and productivity improvements. However, these are expected to differ depending on the sector given the differences in perceived benefits within each sector.
