23-Emerald IV

Question

Perpetual Licenses No Longer Available After January 1, 2018

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
May 25, 2017
7 replies
41828 views

For those who haven't seen it yet, PTC has officially announced that perpetual licenses will no longer be available for purchase starting January 1, 2018.

"...effective January 1, 2018, new software licenses for its core solutions and ThingWorx platform will be available only by subscription in the Americas and Western Europe. Customers in these regions may continue to use their existing perpetual licenses and renew support on active licenses."

Yes, this includes Creo, Windchill, etc. The only exception is Kepware.

Additional information available here:

Licensing

Marco Tosin

21-Topaz I

Thanks for the information Tom.

Marco

I

Inoram

14-Alexandrite

So the new user base is going to slow in growth after that.

B

BenLoosli

23-Emerald III

It already has slowed!

I'm just glad I have extra license that only need maintenance renewed to bring them up to date if we hire more designers.

J

jnelson

14-Alexandrite

I just want to thank PTC (sarcastically) for doing this, of course for my benefit (as a VAR recently stated).

I don't know why I am (a little) surprised that PTC would follow along what other vendors are doing instead of staying on a path that give customers the option to do subscriptions or not. Does anyone else remember the days when PTC was the "leader" of the market where others would follow there lead?

Subscriptions MAY have some benefit to the large customers with hundreds of users, but, for the small businesses (at least mine) I see NO benefit AT ALL! My company would rather pay the over priced initial purchase to "own" the software, along with the over priced maintenance each year, instead of the subscription renewals. Speaking of yearly subscription renewal, the last I was told it was going to be year to year (or multi year), so what is the difference from the perpetual renewal? Whatever happen to the slogan PTC kept using when CREO was first introduced, ANY SOFTWARE, ANY TIME, ONLY PAY WHAT FOR WHAT YOU NEED WHEN YOU NEED IT?

Subscriptions FORCE me to pay at renewal or else I cannot use the software anymore, but, at least with the perpetual I have the option of saving money each year by skipping maintenance, especially if there is no new release worth switching too... Again, my company would rather pay the over priced up front cost.... PTC, do you really understand your Small Business customer needs? Do your VARs, and are they telling you what customers say or what you want to hear?

Ideally I was hoping for a combination of perpetual and subscription at the same time. For example my base package license to be perpetual and any additional module (app) would be subscription, such as PRO/CABLE, since I may not need/use that for more then 6 months at a time.

Thanks PTC. You just gave my management another reason to question why are we use PRO/E and Windchill (and don't even get me started on Windchill and how it is NOT A SMALL BUSINESS solution for CAD PDM)

3

346gnu

13-Aquamarine

"Ideally I was hoping for a combination of perpetual and subscription at the same time."

Yes, so was I.

PTC observes but does not comment.

Consequently my feelings about this forum have changed too. (Not the contributors I hasten to add)

I, as others am keen to help here but now I am disinclined to participate any more. To me it seems PTC have withdrawn their input (presumably made them all redundant) as I assume they see the users performing the support function themselves, at their own time and expense and in exchange for kudos points.

Users who advance therefore find themselves lonely and eventually the only purpose of maintenance is to get software updates. I think PTC use this forum and our accumulated knowledge to benefit their bottom line and fail to support more advanced users in return.

Although this may seem somewhat oblique to the original thread, it is not. It offers up something immediate.

One possibility is that users simply stop using this forum and convene elsewhere in private to provide mutual support. Somewhere PTC can't ‘leverage’ (their favourite word). But that is a huge amount of effort and someone would have to organise it …

Alternatively, if everyone simply submitted a post once a day entitled “we do not like the subscription only model, why won't you listen?” or similar and stop answering technical questions we will upset someone pretty quickly. Even in the short time between now and Christmas.

It is well known that Corporates only begrudgingly listen when the bottom line is affected. I am unlikely to get the shareholders antsy and Jim Heppelmann is not going to phone me and ask me to stop it. But life could be made uncomfortable for some middle management who has failed to control what’s happening and has missed some metric based on forum stats as a result.

D

DeanLong

1-Visitor

Anyone know if PTC will allow access to a perpetual code that I already bought years ago when my computer eventually dies? I do not have active maintence. This whole subscription deal simply stated...sucks. I have 2.0 on my laptop and ZERO of my clients run 3 or 4 so there is/was no real need, nor does it help me to upgrade. So, I simply will have to bite the subscription bullet when and if my client base moves up. But, I already paid for 2.0 and would need to continue to run it until I am forced up by clients. Anyone know if I will be able to get my 2.0 access without being fleeced by PTC?

T

TomU

Author

23-Emerald IV

Yes, you can continue to access and use any perpetual licenses you already own, PTC just isn't selling any new ones after the beginning of the year. Going forward you can continue to pay maintenance on these perpetual licenses, just know that the yearly maintenance increase will be much higher than the subscription increase. I would expect that eventually the annual maintenance on existing products will cost more than what a brand new subscription costs.

Also keep in mind that with a subscription license, if you stop the subscription you lose the ability to run the product at all. With perpetual licenses you do not have this same loss of access to your intellectual property.

D

DeanLong

1-Visitor

Thanks Tom,

Yeah, I suspected the same thing. Being in the Pro/E game since 1987 I have seen the slimy side of sticking it to the customer all too much over those three decades. It's easy to see, eventually, PTC would drive the cost to buy/maintain so high in a couple years that it will be a fools errand to use anything else but a subscription. So, after year 2/3/4 depending on the functionality required in each license, the software will cost more each year to use making the shareholders quite happy, no doubt. It's just the way it goes as the price of doing business.

But on a good note, after much contemplation (and a delicious Thanksgiving dinner) over the weekend, I have purchased a competitors product that does not require a subscription that allows me to do everything I need to for my design work. PTC, you have competition and I purchased one for substantially less money than yours. The best part is, it was knowing nobody's hands will be in my pocket next year looking to keep their gravy train rolling. Sure there are a few hurdles to contend with...but that is well worth the cost savings to me.

3

346gnu

13-Aquamarine

The urge to be sarcastic is almost overwhelming. But I have kudos points and last time I looked I was a Spaceman or Moon Rocket or something. So I have to be grown up.

I've been on about this for months

PTC have shown no evidence that they care about small companies.

I have reopened my case

13878078

Can anyone confirm or correct the following?

If you are 1 day late with your maintenance then you are off perpetual and onto subscription. Zero lattitude.
PTC have rescoped the standard license so it does NOT have contact. Anyone studying assemblies must get the Advanced subscription. Anyone wanting finite friction for the extra money will find it doesn't work.
Perpetual licenses will NOT receive new functionality. To get this one has to change to subscription.
PTC will increase maintenance cost unreasonably so as to make it difficult not to move to subscription
PTC have not acknowledged that small business carry much greater risk. The incremental subscription costs as a consequence of delays to projects outside their control could damage or even sink them.

B

BenLoosli

23-Emerald III

Perpetual licenses will NOT receive new functionality. To get this one has to change to subscription.

This has always been true. You bought options X and Y. Then they develop option W. Option W is an extra cost module you need to purchase separatly.

In some rare cases PTC has included new functionality into an existing package.

PTC introduces new packages which include new functionality, and offer a reduced upgrade charge to change out your license. Not sure this will still be possible with the new subscription licensing in place.

D

DeanLong

1-Visitor

Ben,

Are you referring to Build Codes (I.E. M060, M080, M220)? In other words, if M080 was purchased then that is what will be given? I would assume if Maintenece was included in the purchase price then the last build code of that particular Rev will be given.

Thanks

T

TomU

Author

23-Emerald IV

PTC has released a response. You can read it here:

http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=85

D

DeanLong

1-Visitor

Read it. I would call that a non-statement. Over the last 30 years with PTC, I have seen numberous similar "statements".

3

346gnu

13-Aquamarine

Hey Eric Snow,

Why doesn't Paul Lenfest get down and dirty with us here rather than the inertial process of PTCUser?

T

TomU

Author

23-Emerald IV

Looking at the latest financial results, PTC seems to be accomplishing what they intended. Here are a few quotes:

License and Subscription Bookings

For the full year, CAD bookings grew 14%, far outpacing market growth. This was the second consecutive year of double-digit, constant currency CAD bookings growth.

Subscription % of Bookings
Q4’17 subscription mix of 72% was above our guidance of 68% and was the highest quarterly mix posted to date.

Software Revenue
Software revenue grew 10% YoY in Q4’17 and 5% YoY for FY’17 as we exited the subscription trough, due to the success of our subscription transition program,

Solutions Software Revenue
Quarterly software revenue growth of 10% in Q4’17 was the first double-digit growth quarter since Q3’14, prior to our move to a subscription model.

Other Highlights

In Q4’17, subscription bookings represented 72% of total bookings, 4 percentage points higher than our guidance of 68% and 2 percentage points higher than our Q4’16 bookings mix of 70%. For FY’17, subscription bookings represented 69% of total bookings... Programs promoting the benefits of subscription as well as our support conversion program are driving our ongoing success in our transition to a subscription business model.

FY'18 Guidance

A higher mix of subscription bookings is expected to benefit us over the long term, but results in lower revenue and lower earnings in the near term.

For FY’18, we expect 80% of our bookings to be subscription vs. 69% in FY’17, with subscription mix exiting the year at 85% in Q4’18.

Note our FY’18 subscription revenue guidance exceeds our subscription bookings guidance by more than 20% for the first time in our transition, illustrating the compounding benefit of a subscription business model as it matures over time.

3

346gnu

13-Aquamarine

I've been reading Gartner publications discussing flat sales 2016 and increasing proportion of leasing. Documents awash with 'Boston Matrices'.

This is generic trend and not limited to software.

For PTC it's business and its working for them at the moment. Fair enough. Surely we can only conclude that this transient will see a user base 'adjustment' and that's that. Leasing will work for some, others will change. Some may be driven by the investment they have in their databases and training; changing course is not cheap and to be put in the position where they lease or retrain is not fair.

I see the company that offers a mixture of both perpetual and leasing surviving better than one who only leases. There again, PTC's website looks less and less like that of an engineering software company so who knows what their grand plan is. It will be very interesting to analyse the resulting stratification; to understand the type of company and circumstances for whom leasing is best and those that prefer perpetual licenses.

It seems Solidworks (I read as the directly competing product) do not have the same view on leasing; although it is possible to lease I think they are firmly entrenched in the perpetual camp (at the moment !)

PTC have always had the extra separately licensed modules which I gather are now being 'bundled' in various permutations to incentivise prospective lease victims. So it must be reviewed that the following:

Fatigue (has always been much better than fatigue advisor and still is)
Advanced Surfacing
Mechanism dynamics equivalent

Are all in the standard version of Solidworks including contact. Contact being funtionality PTC has scoped out of their 'standard' offering which I have said before is misguided at best. The Solidworks simulation matrix seems more sensibly structured.

The pricing structure is cack-handed. Why on earth would you lease Creo and have it switch off at midnight one year later when for 2 years lease you can have a perpetual license of Solidworks and zero anxiety. The ratios are crackers.

And the incentive structure PTC offer is **bleep**-eyed too.

Bringing up to date the maintenance of our second simulation seat (Currently at Creo3.0) makes a move to Solidworks very very cheap indeed. Then when we factor in attendant uncertainties regarding future treatment of perpetual license owners by PTC the decision becomes really easy.

I have had many discussions this week. Twice I was told (no prompting) that it was wrong that a company should have to pay to access/use/update its IP after midnight LEASE = RANSOME. The second red flag was the potential to run out of license on a project with limited margin is a massive no-no.

Thus we will keep one seat of Parametric and Simulation maintained and leave the other sad sorry wasted investment to slowly wither. We won't renew the surfacing extension either as when compared to the cost of a solidworks seat it would be a stupid idea. We will continue to use Ansys and FE-Safe in the background.

At the end of the day our customers use both Creo and Solidworks. For us, CAD is a fancy geometry preprocessor and provided we get the right answer the analysis package is broadly irrelevant unless someone is particularly precious about which we use (remember, there is no bad software. Only bad users). Of course, if you want to study finite friction or large deformation with contact then the former does not work and the latter is extremely painful in Creo Simulate if you have yielding materials.

Oh yes, Solidworks have submodelling too ... and before anyone tells me to submit product ideas, I have. I cannot be bothered anymore. The level of feedback I received is exactly zero which exactly matches the feedback I got to my questions regarding leasing.

3

346gnu

13-Aquamarine

Ha ha,

It would appear the censoring software for this forum is set to 'sensitive flower'

I blame my poorly applied hyphenating, the word should not have been.

The word in the previous post

**bleep**-eyed

should have been

cockeyed

meaning crooked or askew, misaligned. And is not some kind of inuendo. Of course, 'inuendo' could be an inuendo.

The etymology is interesting and varies depending on which website you believe, so ignoring those that have blatently plagiarised each other I quite like the possible Gaelic origin "caog" meaning "wink"

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