September 2019 saw the start of a new chapter at Oasys, after over 40 years of selling perpetual software licences we have followed other software and high technology companies in moving to a lease-based model. We are calling this new model “subscription.” These leases will renew automatically until they are cancelled in the same way as a magazine subscription does.
At present, the operation of the software will stay precisely as it is now and updating will be optional. Users with a current subscription will be entitled to install the latest versions but will not be obliged to do so and the update process will still be manual.
So why have we made this change?
Software is becoming increasingly complex with greater demand for interoperation, data exchange and automation to meet the demands of the BIM age. With greater complexity comes greatly increased development costs and many of these new complexities are far from being incremental developments on existing software. It has been apparent for some time that the development of new functionality for existing users was being heavily subsidised by the income provided by new customers purchasing licences, and in a mature market of a fixed size this was not a sustainable imbalance. Increasing the basic purchase prices would have simply put up barriers to new customers adopting Oasys software and done nothing to redress the balance.
All new purchases from September 1st 2019 have been for subscriptions, either 12 month or 36 month with the longer commitment both attracting a discount and locking in the current price for the next two years.
As part of the move to subscription we have introduced some software bundles that combine several existing products making them available at a heavily discounted price.
For existing customers there will be several options to allow them to migrate from the legacy perpetual licence model to the new subscription model:
- For licences purchased within the past three years – a partial refund against new subscriptions
- For older licences – transitional discounts to provide a stepped transition over several years from current maintenance model to the new subscriptions
- Continue to pay maintenance but at a rate that gradually increase over the next 3 years
- Freeze existing licences at the current version and use this unsupported alongside new subscriptions
What is in this for the customer?
New licences will be far cheaper to obtain and the costs will be more evenly spread – prices for subscriptions over 3 years are priced such that the total cost is approximately the same as the purchase price plus maintenance over the same period.
There will be far greater flexibility allowing customers to tailor their software licences to more closely reflect their projected workload.
Any additional revenue generated will be invested back into software development to accelerate the introduction of new features and capabilities.
Existing customers with maintenance will be contacted as their maintenance renewals fall due so we can go over the options, but if you want to know what this means to your company in detail at an earlier date please contact us.
Where next?
The move to subscription away from perpetual licences opens the door to new ways of using Oasys software based on a pay-per-use model and the implementation of software on “The Cloud.”
Exciting times!
Oasys September 2019