What's the price of Catia, really?

As my boss back in the early days of CADalyst said, "Price is news."

Problem is that today most software vendors in our industry don't publish prices. For instance, how much does Catia cost? It has the rumoured reputation of being the most expensive CAD system on the planet.

Over on Dezignstuff, Rick McWilliams got us a price:

I got a quote on CATIA V6 from a VAR. It took them 3 weeks to do it. $34,700.00

Plus 18% maintenance per year ($6,246 in this case). He adds that it consists of many modules, and so the price ranges from $9,000 to $65,000 per seat, depending on the modules selected.

(The reason Mr McWilliams mentions "3 weeks," is because of Dassault's claim that you can order Catia V6 online and then be running it, all in 20 minutes.)

Source:
www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=7516#comments 

Comments

[Andy Reilly]

Hi, my name is Andy Reilly from the DS CATIA brand and I was part of the discussion about CATIA V6 and the comment from Rick McWilliams was made during our exchanges. It may be of more interest for your readers to look at the complete exchange because it covers much more than a single price for an undisclosed content.
I have no idea if CATIA is "the most expensive system on the planet" but given the range of CATIA V6 capability from mechanical, styling, knowledge, systems, electrical, composites, piping and tubing etc make a comparison of stacking all the product prices together and the saying we are the most expensive is a little misleading.

Kind Regards

Andy Reilly

[Jon Banquer]

Price is only one issue Dassault tries to completely ignore.

Catia’s CGM kernel allows multi-core processor support. This should give Catia a huge advantage over Siemens NX and PTC Creo and should be shown in direct comparisons using video. Where are the direct comparisons of Catia to NX and Creo when it comes to regenerating parts and assemblies?

Here is proof that the CGM kernel used by Catia and soon SolidWorks V6 offers what Parasolid, D-Cubed and PTC Granite One don’t appear to offer at all:

http://www.spatial.com/blog/leveraging-multi-core-hardware

Siemens Parasolid is thread safe but thread-safety is only a prerequisite to concurrency.

Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA
http://cadcamtechnologyleaders.blogspot.com/

[Douglas Folk]

Both parties failed to include the cumbersome interfaces with Catia. This alone can cost up to 30-40% waste of time in-turn driving the cost, at the business level, considerately higher. [I am including the fact that you will need to buy a $399 spaceball to zoom, pan, and minipulate your model on screen.] Maybe they can utilize multicore but if you can't easily translate your ideas to a Consumer product you will be lagging behind in productivity. I have used Pro/E since 1991 and I thought their interface was poor. Looking back the Wildfire Revision was an awsome step forward. Catia is like what Pro/E was prior to the Sketcher Revamp v12?.

[carl]

Catia change their core product when they moved from V4 to V5 completely destroying anyone that used the products history. The company I worked for at the time stated after this massive headache that they will never recover from "they wished they had moved to Pro/E". Another interesting factor.. we investigated moving the 80% of the business from Catia to Pro/E and then compared this to moving 20% of the Pro/E business to Catia. Apples to Apples in software was almost Identical in cost. Think about that... O the STEP translators for Dassault Catia was $5000.00 per user. And we could not share licenses globally.

[War]

I think the critics for catia are abit misleading. I have used catia for 4 years now and still using it with out any problem. I have used pro-e, NX and working around inventor. I feel Catia lets me be more creative and the model is rugged. No concern for performance issues.

The user interface is almost like anyother, sometimes I feel its better than others. Also the scripting feature lets me customize alot of daily work so that they are just one click away.

[Kevin De Smet]

CATIA has a great name recognition, and sure it works, but it's not particularly impressive nor better enough than mid range systems to warrant the premium price.

And for most of its more advanced modules, usually companies use other tools anyway. Vistagy instead of Dassault's Composites, ICEM Surf instead of Icem Shape Design and it just goes on and on like that