So earlier in these ruminations I stated that I thought 30% less was the new watermark, that is, 30% less work out there, 30% off what used to be a winning bid.  Early market data from Jon Peddie Research, shows a  22% drop in 2009 CAD revenues as compared to 2010.  This is just on the software side, not services, which we can argue would be worse. Subscriptions are down because why renew an empty seat as are new sales.  This report deals with CAD on all levels from designing parts to designing buildings but still gives a good overview of the industry.  The good news for those embracing BIM is that they reaffirm other anecdotal information that BIM is a bottom up phenomena not a mandate from management. That is, the people building the buildings are the ones who are using not because of perceived value or marketing spin but because it adds value.  Hammer..check…Compressor…check…BIM model…

Updated Aug 2010

I noticed a lot of traffic to this page, and also noticed that the link to the report required a log in so decided to quote it here.

Let’s just get this over with: the year 2009 was a disaster in the CAD industry. According to our latest report, the CAD industry saw revenues of $5.1 billion, a 22% drop compared to 2008 and although the picture is improving for 2010, there is no rebound because that’s just not the way the CAD industry works, and worse, that’s not how this recession worked.

The CAD industry cannot turn on a dime because it’s part of larger systems. At this year’s Autodesk University, Carl Bass noted that subscriptions were down because there’s not much reason to maintain a subscription for empty seats. Unfortunately, there are a lot of empty seats for all CAD systems worldwide. We estimate that approximately 200,000 workers left the CAD industry worldwide. And, it can be added, we believe this is a conservative view.

In this latest report we have seen an interesting trend as Building Information Modeling (BIM) becomes accepted in the engineering, architecture and construction (AEC) industry. The similar discipline, PLM is just about ubiquitous in MCAD but as it was being introduced into the MCAD industry in the early 90s, it was essentially implemented in a top-down process as management signed up for the advantages that come with a consistent and connected data pipeline. In contrast, BIM in the architectural fields is being driven by those at the end of the pipeline in building and construction.