Autodesk drops sales of perpetual licenses. Instead the company is going to sell subscriptions for its software products.
Autodesk drops sales of perpetual licenses. Instead the company is going to sell subscriptions for its software products. This new practice is going active on February 1, 2016. It should come as no surprise, because a couple of month ago the company already announced gradual transition to subscription-only software.
Subscription-based model is going to be used for all Autodesk products except Flame (because of the hardware component). The Entertainment Creation Suite, which includes Maya, 3ds Max, MotionBuilder and Mudbox, could be purchases as a perpetual license for a period of time. All standalone products are going to be available through desktop subscriptions. New products (including Smoke) will be distributed only as desktop or cloud subscriptions.
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Transition is going to be painless, as Autodesk is eager to partner with their clients and help them to get the most out of its subscription-based model. Autodesk’s approach is vastly different from the one of Adobe. If you have already purchased a perpetual software license with a maintenance subscription, everything is going to stay the same. You just need to stay on that maintenance subscription plan. If have perpetual licenses, you will receive benefits, upgrades and other cool bonuses.
There will be no multi-year maintenance subscription discounts. You will also have an opportunity to purchase monthly subscriptions through channel partners. There’s still a number of ways to save money for heavy users. You can buy services for one months, 6 month, a year, depending on your personal pipeline.
Subscription-based products will come with seamless integration and a bunch of management options, which will help to keep all the products updated to their latest versions. Updates will become smaller and more frequent.
Autodesk believes that cloud-based software distribution and maintenance is more getting more important for the whole industry.
The software industry is seeing a disruption of the same magnitude as when we moved from mainframes to PCs. The cloud is the mainframe-to-PC disruption of this era, and it’s causing all software companies to reevaluate how they deliver and build software. If you’re not a cloud company in five years, you’re not a software company in five years. That’s our view at Autodesk. And we’ve responded to this disruption and made it integral to how we do business.
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Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk Senior VP of Industry Strategy and Marketing
Source: news.autodesk.com