Altium Concorde Pro - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2019, 06:48:37 am
content: Anyone seen this yet? I just attended a webinar about it and I'm quite interested.On first impressions, i really like it.. it has proper component life cycle management as well as workflow and it looks like it makes sense to use from the walkthrough i saw.Big news is it's a 100% subscription model - no perpetual license. though because it's still nominally "a product" there's still an upfront licensing cost just to play (208/month on altium's website when I just looked!) then $42/seat for the number of concurrent users you need. So it still punishes small shops compared to bigger shops... one user working on their own (OK probably a standard DBlib is all you need there anyway, but....) a single seat user pays $250/month, while a 10 seat user pays 628/month or 63/seat... for $63/seat this is a total no brainer.. for $250/seat it's still kind of good I think, but definitely needs to be thought about. Especially considering the server requirements on top of the licensing... but licensing alone is way more than doubling the base AD subscription at that point!Still, at least the price is now in reach of small shops, unlike vault....Speaking of vault, that thing is looking pretty musty and deprecated these days.The windows server requirements still look painful, and the ability to share parts database across the world with a distributed team looks like it's a matter of having a windows server guru on your team to keep everything protected and up to date and basically not get it wiped and turned into a bitcoin miner or botnet every 2nd day. the guy running the webinar said they're aiming for a hosted/cloud offering and suggested that could be a thing next year... which to be honest, for a parts database to be used by a small team, I'd much prefer. (I'd prefer a ready to go VM appliance I could just spin up and host on any cloud provider myself, most of all..)Not sure how I feel about a purely time licensed add-in for altium.. I guess that it's a non-essential part of the product and if worst comes to worst and altium suddenly fell off the face of the earth (I don't think they will) you could always generate a simpler library by library-ising all your altium projects that used their parts...But it's an interesting indicator of things to come.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2019, 10:55:27 am
content: It's not a new product, it's a rebranding.Basic answer: Altium Concord pro is yesterday's Altium Nexus. Altium Nexus is Altium Nexus with workflow and integrations targeted at big companies. Altium Designer is the standalone product.Here is the official answer from Altium: (to the question - more or less - "what are you doing I don't understand a thing we just bought nexus...")QuoteNote: FAE means Field Application Engineer---Regarding the library capabilities, my company is working on a product for library management based on existing Altium DBLib functionality.While it does have drawbacks, such as not completely being able to use 100% of the cute new functionality of the Component panel and (for now) not having the "used in" field for components, is also much more flexible (and cheap).

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2019, 01:09:04 pm
content: I remember your library product announcement.. it sounded really interesting to me too. how is it going?Yes concord seems related to Nexus, sure. Actually going to the nexus pages on the altium site it looks like they just cut 3/4 of its functionality out and left the component stuff (and the MCAD integration? that's a puzzling thing to bundle with components)At the end of the day though, whatever it is, looks to me that it's finally very close to the parts control and workflow thing I was hoping for when vaults were first released back with AD10 or whatever it was... And they are finally managing to make a significant add-on to the basic EDA tool that doesn't require you to be a 20+ seat company to even consider it.I guess we'll see what happens, but if they can work on making it into a maintained VM appliance that you spin up on any cloud host, rather than a big windows server application, it looks like it could be very useful to a lot of companies.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2019, 07:20:03 pm
content: Quote from: julianhigginson on May 09, 2019, 01:09:04 pmIt's almost MVP (Minimun Viable Product). I'm using it daily for design. Currently still have 2 issue to solve:* functionality to import from an existing dblib is currently being developed* Not sure about how to distribute it from a tecnical and commercial standpoint

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 17, 2019, 06:15:41 am
content: Quote from: ddavidebor on May 13, 2019, 07:20:03 pmthat second one's a biggie! good luck.:-)I'd be keen to hear when you're ready to beta test it in the outside world.