Bangalore, India
Yesterday, Coordinate Systems announced a strategic partnership with CADHaus, Mexico. We have been working with CADHaus since 2007 and offering them IntelliCAD-based Lisp programming services. Since then, a lot of water has flown under the bridge. CADHaus is now promoting Bricscad in Mexico and is a reseller of GeoTools as well.
Luis Carlos Lopez, the CEO of CADHaus and I had a long chat yesterday and we recollected the early days when AutoCAD was the only name that mattered in the CAD world, when choices were few and nobody wanted or thought of an alternative.
Luis told me the story of CADHaus - they started their CAD business in 1992 as an AutoCAD distributor in Mexico. Initially things went smoothly, but eventually cracks started to appear in their relationship with Autodesk. Like with many other companies across the world, CADHaus soon found the going tough. Luis was quick to clarify here: "The product (AutoCAD) itself, has always been very good and stable. It is the company, Autodesk, with which we (and our customers) had problems." The most important complaint was that of pricing (initial payment and forced subscription/upgrade payments) and attitude. And that is one of the main issues even today.
"Imagine if it takes 8 or more months of a young engineer's salary to buy a single license of AutoCAD", said Luis to describe the pricing scenario. In the meantime, an alternative-to-AutoCAD was taking shape and gaining acceptance in the form of IntelliCAD. "In 2003, we terminated our relationship with Autodesk and became the country-wide distributor for IntelliCAD", said Luis. The growth of IntelliCAD, although not very spectacular, continued with all its strengths and weaknesses notwithstanding. 2007 saw the rise of a third option - Bricsys started to develop Bricscad, a native stand-alone CAD platform. Since then, there has been no stopping and today, Bricscad offers the most challenging alternative not just to AutoCAD, but to all other IntelliCAD based CAD as well. Recognizing this new emerging platform and the growing support of third-party applications built around it, CADHaus has once again shifted gears and is now a Bricscad reseller for Mexico.
Looking back on the turn of events, Luis listed four critical factors that seemed to take away users from AutoCAD:
- Very high price - Both new licenses and maintenance
- Unfriendly sales policies from Autodesk
- Attempt to sell by threats, force and legal action.
- Attempt to eliminate third-party developers and their products that did not go well with Autodesk strategy.
This highlights the fact that all service providers and vendors must listen to their customer's requirements and concerns and stay connected with them. A disconnect and a tendency to thrust down stuff that clients do not want is what earned Autodesk a lot of bad press and loss of market-share. And that has been an opportunity for many smaller players to grab a slice of the CAD pie.
The CADHaus story is a clear evidence of this.
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