You’re probably aware that Autodesk has been going through the latter stages of prepping its entry into the PLM space since the announcement of PLM 360 last december (we covered it pretty extensively back then).
I’ve just sat on a much hyped ‘webinar‘ where the team confirmed the pricing. It seems that today’s thing has been hyped into oblivion to confirm five things:
- It’s live at www.autodeskplm360.com
- The first three users (including admin rights etc.) are free
- After that it’s $75 a month on an annual contract for similar levels of interactivity
- Then if you’ve got “participants” then you’re looking at $25 a month
- Though there looks to be an introductory offer as well
A couple of things spring to mind. This is a cloud-based service. There’s very little else on the market, whether its dropbox.com, salesforce.com or anything else, that works on an annual contract basis. The idea is that you have greater flexibility on the cloud, to optimise your expenditure where you need it. There’s also no mention of suppliers being able to use a single ‘membership‘ to access multiple client accounts (which in a supply chain environment, makes huge sense).
Strangely Autodesk are saying this is a first. I’m pretty sure the folks at Arena Solutions have something to say about that – its business model is the same, its pricing is similar (within five bucks) and it’s been on the market for years.
The other is that there’s no mention of data storage allowance. Now, while 360 isn’t meant to replace Vault (which holds the heavy CAD data), when it comes to engineering data things can ramp up pretty quickly. Once you start to include things like PDF data sheets, test results, even lightweight CAD data, the data storage requirements can get mean.
Autodesk hasn’t made any mention of a pretty key aspect so far.
