Access, Data and Licensing

Context

Some leading AEC tools in use today have shifted towards poor value offerings over the past 5-10 years, where the ‘actual’ cost of using a single design tool have become almost incalculable against the genuine production output by a designer. These spiralling costs to design firms become extremely hard to justify when these products are not fulfilling fundamental design requirements or are not evolving at the pace of the AEC industry itself.

These issues have been further compounded by licensing models where tools are now fully allocated to named individuals who may not fully use a product, or by having to predict expenditure for access currencies.

In short, emerging licensing models do not align with the way that the AEC industry functions; nor will it be able to impact the status quo.

What we need

Better value through improved access, data and licensing models.

We want to pay for tools that offer genuine value and efficiencies to our creative design process, respond to the design factors we need to deliver, and improve collaboration with partners and data interoperability.

The commercial offerings around any future design software should:

Be based on the specific tools or applications we use at a product level, not bundled within those we don't.
Not charge to move data/resolve geometry between tools. They will not be used.
Not lock users into dedicated annually named licenses, which cannot be fully utilised by designers.
Not charge by construction value. This moves the expectation to the Client/Budget Holder/Investment Fund to decide on the appropriate design tools for the designers to use. This will make products unviable.
Provide predictability for operation costs of tools by avoiding consumable/token-based usage.
Provide medium to longer terms financial models for mature/profitable firms to plan their software costs better.
Provide transparent usage analysis and tools to support customers using the most cost-effective models.
Provide real time insight into usage and activity.
At no charge, provide administration tools for organisations to manage, track and allocate licences, with systems that are flexible and acknowledge the need for enterprise level licence management systems.