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| CAD User Magazine - October '99: Editorial Comment |
| The big news story this month is that Autodesk have
been cutting jobs. This comes as a result of lower than expected
revenues for both the first and second quarters of their financial year.
Unfortunately the cuts would appear to be more of an effort to appease
investors than an attempt to improve what the customers see – namely
the products. Autodesk’s excuse for poor revenues is that customers
have been slow to take up new products such as AutoCAD 2000 and many
have been waiting for LT 2000 rather than buy older products. There is
undoubtedly a reticence in the market to upgrade, but I suspect it is
more to do with boredom than strategic upgrading. Users are bored of
products which do the same thing just a little bit better. The CAD
market has now matured so that the ‘drawing’ part of a project is a
very small piece. The growth area is now in the document storage, data
delivery and ancillary products. This month we take a look at several
products, which are not necessarily associated with the mainstream CAD
market. Since most CAD departments generate more data than the rest of
the company put together we introduce some of the new products which are
emerging in the data storage arena. Storage Area Networks and Networked
Attached Storage are two approaches to providing faster and more
reliable storage without going through the bottleneck of a server. Of
course with this profusion of data it is not surprising that more people
want to gain access to it. There is a wealth of valuable information
tied up in CAD files. CAD departments need to be looking at new ways to
distribute information in order to disseminate this information. We have
looked at online collaboration before – but this month we take a
slightly more in-depth look at ways of distributing designs. We also
look at how some companies are replacing traditional CAD products with
technical diagramming in order to simplify the whole process of sales to
design and installation.
All this is a long way from the traditional way that CAD departments have operated so it is no surprise that managers and IT departments are biding their time before buying yet more traditional CAD products. Users need to evaluate the whole way they use and distribute data in the light of new technology. The CAD Management Roadshow – touring the country in November – will provide an ideal opportunity for you to investigate and discuss these issues. There will be lots of opportunity to discuss with other users and technical experts in areas such as print distribution, data translation, document management, data storage and legacy data. Can you afford to miss this event – find out more at www.caduser.com or phone us direct. Jonathan Richardson |
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