The Business Advantage Group recently announced the results of its Worldwide CAD Trends 2016 Survey and this week announced more details specific to the trends in Cloud based CAD.
“Cloud based CAD is currently in use by 11% of respondents and strong future growth is anticipated. By the end of this year (2016) around 19% (~70% growth) are expected to be using “Cloud based CAD”. This is likely to go up to 29% in the next 3-5 years (~160% growth). Clearly Cloud based CAD continues to be an area of interest in today’s market with strong future growth potential,” said Chris Turner, CEO/Managing Director of Business Advantage.
Cloud based CAD has ‘high awareness’ (58%) among CAD users, managers and executives and offers new business and delivery models for CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM/PLM software companies. Rather than software being deployed and used locally, Cloud based solutions enable the software to be loaded and run somewhere else but be accessible anywhere with an internet connection. It’s worth noting that this is different from cloud based licensing in which software subscriptions are managed in the cloud but the software operates on local machines.
Research findings show…
- 2015-2020 Significant Growth Expected: 2016 Cloud based CAD growth is predicted at a healthy and significant ~70% (11% to 19% of all CAD users) and 3-5 year growth at ~160% (11% to 29%). Looking at individual sectors, in 2016 AEC (including utilities) Cloud based CAD is predicted to grow by 64% (14% to 23%) and Manufacturing Cloud based CAD is predicted to grow by 60% (10% to 16%). Over the next 3-5 years usage in AEC (including utilities) is predicted to grow by 135% (from 14% to 33%) and Manufacturing (including process and power) by ~160% (from 10% to 26%). There are some indications that long term future growth is more likely to come from the Americas and EMEA than APAC
- Importance: Compared to some of the other trends, Cloud based CAD, has a below average Importance ranking (mean score of 3.8 out of 10). Importance by sector varies, with AEC (including utilities) users rating this trend at 4.5 out of 10 and manufacturing (including process and power) users rating it at 3.4 out of 10. Therefore, at the present time, Cloud based CAD appears to be more important to AEC users, where the greater need for ‘mobility’ within the AEC sector contributes to the higher importance ratings
- Top Benefits: Based on those using or planning to use Cloud based CAD (~180) the top perceived benefits and productivity changes over all sectors are ‘higher mobility’ (67%) followed by ‘ease of updating software’ (47%), ‘cost reductions’ (46%), ‘increased storage capability’ (32%) and ‘better scalability’ (26%), but by individual sector some of these vary in significance. For example, ‘higher mobility’ scored 73% in AEC (including utilities) and 60% in Manufacturing (including process and power) and ‘increased storage capability’ scored 39% in AEC (including utilities) and 29% in Manufacturing (including process and power)
