One of the most expensive purchases of any architecture and design office is drafting software. Not only does it cost anywhere from $1000 to $3000 a seat but the software changes yearly and every three versions the file formats tend to change as well. Whenever that happens firms either need to buy into the new version or be left behind. Autodesk has come up with their own solution to this, yearly subscriptions. The initial charge is the same as a usual one seat license, but every year they charge the firm about $500 per seat and send you the updated software. This is supposed to save you money while giving them a guarenteed revive stream, which it does but each version still needs better hardware to operate at maximum efficiency. That’s about a $2000 investment per machine on at least a three year rolling clock. In all, that’s a lot of expense especially for a new found firm. It’s no wonder people turn to piracy, unauthorized installs, and multiple seats. Citrix has a different solution. They have developed a virtualization software which can eliminate the rolling hardware expense. This software is like most virtualization software, it lives on a host [...]
Sep 212009