The big news story this month is that Autodesk have been cutting jobs. This comes as a result of lower than expected revenues for both the first and second quarters of their financial year. Autodesk's excuse for poor revenues is that customers have been slow to take up new products such as AutoCAD 2000 and many have been waiting for LT 2000 rather than buy older products. There is undoubtedly a reticence in the market to upgrade, but I suspect it is more to do with boredom than strategic upgrading.
Users are bored of products which do the same thing just a little bit better.
The CAD market has now matured so that the 'drawing' part of a project is a very small piece. The growth area is now in the document storage, data delivery and ancillary products. This month we take a look at several products, which are not necessarily associated with the mainstream CAD market. Since most CAD departments generate more data than the rest of the company put together we introduce some of the new products which are emerging in the data storage arena. Storage Area Networks and Networked Attached Storage are two approaches to providing faster and more reliable storage without going through the bottleneck of a server.