A-E-C Automation Newsletter Editor-in-Chief Randall S. Newton recently talked with Mark Madura, President and CEO of DATACAD LLC, maker of DataCAD.
RSN: The newest version of DataCAD was quite a while in coming. Any particular reason for the longer period between releases this time?
MM: Our usual upgrade cycle is about 15 months. It took us 24 months to complete DataCAD Release 11. We made fundamental, foundational changes to the program. Our focus was to give this new release some longevity, and to create a foundation for future changes we have planned, such as the release of intelligent objects. The underlying graphics engine now runs in double-precision floating-point. We had several users—including some of our largest customers—ask us to make this change.
RSN: What it the profile of the DataCAD user base today?
MM: There are about 250,000 seats of DataCAD in use worldwide. About half of those are in the US, the rest are international. In the US, about 60,000 design firms have DataCAD, with an average of two seats per firm.
RSN: Do most of these users sign up for every new upgrade?
MM: Our users are of the ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ mentality. We still have active DataCAD users running DOS-based PCs. Many of our users go for years between upgrades.
RSN: And you support all those users with older versions?
MM: Absolutely. We maintain every version of DataCAD, although we release minor upgrades only for the current version. We value their support of DataCAD. As far as we are concerned, once you buy DataCAD you never end being our customer. I think doing the opposite—such as Autodesk does by retiring versions of AutoCAD—is a significant blunder. Having said that, we do encourage our users to stay current, and we stagger our upgrade pricing accordingly. If you now have DataCAD Release 10, for example, the upgrade price is $200. If you have a really old version, the price is $995.
RSN: What new features might entice those users with older versions of DataCAD to upgrade?
MM: With every new release, we try to have a few “must have” features. We’ve added terrain modeling, something that users have been asking for. We now have Adobe Acrobat PDF output—with layers intact. Those two features alone will be worth the upgrade for many users. There are other new features that for some users will be “must have,” including improved crash recovery, network awareness, and automated backups. These last two items, along with going to a double-precision database, are especially important in larger firms, and we think these are the features that will help us sell additional copies into many of our existing user firms.
RSN: AutoCAD has the lion’s share of the architectural design market, especially with smaller firms. What is it that still attracts users to DataCAD?
MM: Our edge is in the variety of architecture-specific tools that we offer right out of the box. The new user doesn’t need to buy add-ons for architectural design or rendering—it’s right in the main product. Also, many AutoCAD users feel forced to use the product. We are noticing more and more frustration in the marketplace. No one feels forced to use DataCAD, and that makes for better customer relations.
RSN: With a user base that isn’t exactly aggressive about upgrading, how do you maintain the company revenue stream?
MM: First of all, we are a small company, 12 employees focused on one product. We only have two full-time technical support representatives. We don’t need a large number of our users to upgrade each year to stay profitable the way a big company does. Also, we only provide free technical support to the users of the current release. Users of older version either pay $35 per support incident or $250 a year for an annual support contract. We also sell subscriptions to our user newsletter, Cheap Tricks. And we are looking at new revenue streams. We think the subscription model of software use and support is important to our future, but we also think our customers aren’t quite ready to embrace it yet. They like the buy-once, use-forever model. To turn the corner to software subscriptions, we will have to offer exceptional value for the annual subscription fee.
RSN: Building information modeling—BIM—has been the buzz lately. Where is DataCAD on the road to BIM?
MM: DataCAD is in its infancy with regards to BIM. We agree with the idea of building information modeling, and DataCAD Release 11 lays a foundation for us to grow in that direction, especially with regards to smart objects. We already have a couple of features that would be useful in a BIM environment today.
RSN: Such as?
MM: For one, DataCAD Release 11 supports the standard file format for 3D stereo lithography, STL. One of our educational distributors asked us to put it in. Schools are adopting these “3D printers” and it seems there are not many CAD programs out there that support them. We also support import of 3DS files as a way to bring in 3D data. 3DS is the original file format for Autodesk 3D Studio. It is not a current format, but there are still quite a few people using it. AutoCAD still writes to it, and it works as a way to bring ACIS data from AutoCAD into DataCAD.
Additional Notes: DataCAD Release 11 sells for $995 for the first license, and $495 for additional licenses in the same firm. This year marks the 20th anniversary of DataCAD. Principal founding software author David A. Giesselman is still with the company, currently as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. A-E-C Automation Newsletter wrote a profile of DataCAD in December, 1997 For more information on the company and the product, visit www.datacad.com.