Opinions

The Synchronous Technology Effect on Solid Edge

deelip

I was fiddling around with the download statistics of SYCODE’s Solid Edge add-ins today and noticed that a third of the Solid Edge users that tried our add-ins were still on V20. That’s the version before Synchronous Technology came out.

Siemens released the second generation of Synchronous Technology about five months ago. So I pulled out a report of our Solid Edge add-in downloads for the last five months. This is what it looked like.

  1. Solid Edge V20 (33.09%)
  2. Solid Edge ST (19.51%)
  3. Solid Edge 19 (15.68%)
  4. Solid Edge ST 2 (9.63%)
  5. Solid Edge V18 (9.38%)
  6. Solid Edge V17 (5.31%)
  7. Solid Edge V16 (2.35%)
  8. Solid Edge V15 and earlier (5.05%)

Like I said before, these figures by no means reflect the actual state of the Solid Edge user base. Rather they very accurately represent the part of the user base that has tried SYCODE’s Solid Edge add-ins. This is just a very small sample of the total Solid Edge user base and I have no way of knowing whether it is a good or a bad one.

Anyways, for discussion sake, let’s take these numbers at face value. I am not surprised that ST2 comes at number four because understandably it does take time for users to get around to deploying a new version of a product. But I am a little surprised that only a fifth are using ST. Surprised because Siemens has been claiming since 2008 that “Synchronous Technology delivers up to a 100x faster design experience” among a host of other things. So I am assuming that either (1) my numbers are totally wrong, or (2) Synchronous Technology does not actually deliver a 100x faster design experience. Because I simply cannot for the life of me accept that Solid Edge users are stupid enough to continue to work a 100x slower than what they could with Synchronous Technology.

As it turns out, for the last five months, the most popular version of Solid Edge that my customers and prospects have been using is V20, a version that is two years old and is devoid of Synchronous Technology. Which brings me to my question. If Solid Edge users themselves have not being very eager to dump their old slower version of Solid Edge and move to the allegedly 100x faster Synchronous Technology, how successful has Siemens been in getting  Inventor and SolidWorks users to jump ship and adopt Synchronous Technology? Did Synchronous Technology indeed have the intended effect on the mid-range MCAD market? Or is a year and a half too less a time to see the effects of Synchronous Technology?

And then of course, all these questions may very well be worth as much as my numbers are.