Kubotek’s Competitive Upgrade Program

Kubotek is trying to relieve some of the history based CAD vendors of their customers through an interesting competitive upgrade program. For just $2200 you can “upgrade” your seat of SolidWorks, Inventor, Pro/ENGINEER, CATIA , NX or for that matter any history based modeler for KeyCreator, the company’s direct modeling solution.

Personally, I don’t believe many people will simply replace a SolidWorks seat for KeyCreator one. However, I don’t believe you need to actually stop using your old CAD system. So if you have few seats of a history based MCAD system and are thinking of buying additional $5000 licenses for people not that involved in the design process, say for the “extended design team”, then this may be a good deal. This will be interesting for people using SolidWorks and Inventor because the $2200 KeyCreator comes with translators for those file formats. You need to pay more for translators for CATIA V4/V5, NX and Pro/ENGINEER.

I am not sure whether asking history based MCAD users to “upgrade” to the history free KeyCreator is a good idea. Personally, I like the approach that SpaceClaim is taking – which is more like promoting itself as a companion product not aiming to replace anything. Come to think of it, SpaceClaim Engineer starts at $1995 and you need to pay more for translators for SolidWorks, Inventor, CATIA, NX, Pro/ENGINEER. So I am looking at this “competitive upgrade” program as more a competition between Kubotek and SpaceClaim.