The pain when support for your CAD software ends
Written by Kari Manner
Posted on September 20, 2022
We’ve all been there: your software vendor announces that support for a product you have used and mastered for a long time is coming to an end. Not exactly the news you’ve been waiting to hear. Uncertainty is never the best feeling.
This scenario is currently playing itself out in the CAD software environment. In the early 2000s, several prominent players cornered a big slice of the plant design market and became entrenched. Many EPC companies invested heavily in these solutions and related customizations. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and several of these CAD software solutions have come to the end of their lifecycles.
That’s generally not a problem if you can seamlessly upgrade to the replacement product, and that’s the catch. Firstly, it will likely be more expensive; you can bet on that! That is not a game-changer as long as you get an improved user experience and greater functionality, something more than just a fresh look and feel. And herein lies the second problem: the replacement products currently being offered on the CAD software market fall short.
A further issue is that the contract terms you got used to in the past may have been replaced with unfavorable terms or appear unnecessarily limiting. It may also seem that your vendor’s focus has changed; it is less concerned with improving plant design functionality, which is essential to you.
In a sense, you’ve come to a fork in the road. Do you continue with the current vendor or look for an alternative? A window of opportunity arises to upgrade to next-generation software. We’ve created a white paper that will help you make this decision.
