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CAD market has now designs on education

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

PUNE, INDIA: It's not just manufacturing or automotives that is fuelling the CAD/CAM market. If new market strategies of players like Think3 are anything to go by, education and engineering institutes are enough to salivate the appetite next.

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Education segment in PLM market is pegged at around dollars six to seven million on a conservative estimate, shares Vignesh Kumar, head - sales, South Asia, for Think3.

"It's strange but even today in many engineering institutes, people use drawing board and computer-based training is conspicuous by its absence. The industry at least has 2D software ubiquitously. There is plenty of opportunity thus to be tapped with this segment and IITs, RECs and leading engineering colleges."

The strategy is to attack the market from the top instead of going for individual pieces and the progress has been smooth so far. It has an MoU with a Polytech department in Maharashtra and another with NID, Bangalore to name a few.

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The offerings include a license each per student as well as site license for the continued usage. The company also recently partnered the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) to train engineering graduates on the latest design trends and future industry requirements.

Apart from Karnataka, Think3 has collaborated with the Rajasthan government for its software in engineering colleges. Other players like SolidWorks have also shown an increased thrust on the education sector in India, with 50 per cent of its user base in 2007 from this segment.

According to the ‘2008 CAD Report’ from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) an analyst firm, CAD software vendors saw combined revenues of $5,234.95 million in 2007 and expectations exist that the CAD market will continue expanding with roughly an 11 per cent compounded annual growth rate through 2012.

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The JPR report also points that strong growth in the emerging economies will offset contractions in the west with significant growth seen in the automotive sector in Latin America, India, China, and Africa.

The overall market size estimates for India range from official figures like $15 million to real market indications around $80 million to 100 million. Taking the latent, unearthed needs into account, the appetite of Think3 ranges around $10 million in three years in India.

Education is a hot vertical in that sense with segments like Polytechnic colleges, ITIs, engineering colleges etc, with a move to encourage people to learn new tools.

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The company that started as Auto CAD in Europe and ventured into the market as a vendor of tools for styling, engineering and tooling stages of manufacturing design, discounts competition from established players like PTC, Dassault as not much of a concern.

Kumar reckons Indian market big enough for everyone given the tier-2 opportunities and company's unique propositions.

"We are unique in the sense of target-driven designs. Why should a designer be slave to software and why can't he easily design in context of a target? Also, we don't go to the big tier but to tier1 and 2 suppliers," he avers.

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Think3, that claims to be a pioneer of global shape modelling (GSM) technology, has aggressive plans for the Indian product lifecycle management (PLM) market. The company plans to tap the automotive, education, defence and consumer product sectors.

"India is a key market for Think3. Indian products are now accepted globally. With China emerging as competition, companies in India are looking at improving manufacturing processes. Over the next three years, India will emerge among the top three markets for Think3."

It claims good growth in the market so far with above 75 customers that includes names like Kumar Motors, Elephant Design, Kinetic Motors, Mahindra Engineering and Maruti, BMW, Fiat Motors, etc. Titan Industries has been a recent win.

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